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Self Cleaning Mouse
mikesd81 writes "LEWIS Wire is reporting on a self-cleaning mouse that disables the survival of bacteria with an auto-disinfecting surface. From the article: 'According to a recent survey from the University of Arizona, the average desk harbors 400 times more bacteria than the average toilet seat. Despite this, office workers rarely have time to clean their desktops frequently or thoroughly enough to be effective. As a result, the presence of microbes contributes to the spread of pneumonia, the flu, pink eye and strep throat, among other extremely contagious viruses.'"
We just figured out 90% of the mouse's dna, and already it's cleaning itself... very nice !
If you "disinfect" a surface, it's like clear-cutting a rain-forest. You've upset the balance, making a fresh new playground where the really baad and hardy weeds might take hold.
It licks it's own balls?
so how long will that survive on the surface? It'll have to be tough to withstand ordinary wear and tear... the contact points where my fingers hold the mouse on my desktop are already worn smooth and the mouse has only been in use for 6 months... sounds like snake-oil to me especially the nano-particle crap...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Compulsive telephone sanitisers. I never caught a flu from MY mouse.... What are they worried about, computers catching a virus?
the average desk harbors 400 times more bacteria than the average toilet seat Clearly, people are doing something wrong with their desks or with their toilets.
Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
Face it, you never catch them all. So some survive, that are more resilent against the agent. They breed. And bacteria do that FAST. The resistance gets inherited. And then again. You are actually causing some un-natural selection that way, until you end up with bacteria that are super aggressive and super resistant against your antibac.
Why do you think the most violent, nasty and resistant bacteria stems are found in hospitals?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If the average desk harbours 400% more bacteria than the average toilet seat wouldn't it have a helluva lot to do with the relative surface area of each.
Okay, just to clear this up: the average toilet seat is, believe it or not, one of the most sterile and least bacteria-ridden places you will find anywhere in your household. It is usually a barren plastic surface with little purchase for bacteria or moisture, it is cleaned and disinfected more than most surfaces, and the only real chance it has of catching anything that bacteria feed on is if someone ends up smearing crap on it - I'm really hope that's not the norm. In addition, what is unfortunately likely to end up on the seat is urine, which is totally sterile and would kill rather than feed most bacteria. Anyone who ever cleans their house will have a pretty sterile seat, and there is not much chance that anything you do pick up on the back of your legs is going to be transferred directly to your face by your hand.
Just about the opposite of all the points above can be said about your keyboard and mouse. It should come as absolutely no surprise that these things are riddled with bacteria...
As is your skin. All of it. You are fucking covered in the little guys, and it's rarely a problem. If you're the sort of person who's likely to get sick from a mouse that hasn't been disinfected, your life is too sterile for you to survive easily in the wild. Self-cleaning mice and mobility-scooters for the morbidly obese - they amount to the same thing: people's poor lifestyles causing them to be unfit to survive normally. I understand why people need these things, but if they'd exercised moderation in all things from the start, they wouldn't be in this situation.
Meta will eat itself
I would call spending 1/3 of every day cleaning excessive, unless you are a janitor.
That's nothing. I have a self-cleaning dog. A friend of mine watched my dog clean himself and said, "Man, I wish I could do that."
I told him, "You better pet him first; he might bite."
Mr. T pitied this fool on 27 July 1992.
According to a recent survey from the University of Arizona, the average desk harbors 400 times more bacteria than the average toilet seat.
There's even more bacteria INSIDE YOU! And no, they're not only "your" bacteria. They are in fact bacteria that you ate, breathed in and so on and so on. They live and breed inside you, and defecate inside you! They also *eat* from whatever is laying around (i.e. YOU).
Shocking? Well it better not be, since they're not going away any time soon. I'm sick of gem-counting revelations and toilet seat comparisons.
I'm proud to say I use a regular dirty mouse and keyboard and I'm still alive and healthy. If someone is concerned he might catch something bad from a computer mouse, he wouldn't be alive to buy this product anyway.
Seriously: if the current contamination really were a problem, we would all be dead. But we aren't, and why? Because the human body has a immune system. So I bet, such a self-cleaning mouse, or even completely sterile desks deployed everywhere wouldn't have any impact on the infection rates.
Actually, desinfecting too much actually leads to other problems. Current studies suggest that too much hygiene may be a big factor in the recent increases of allergies. Also, fighting too aggressively against any kind of etiologic agents only produces more resistant etiologic agents. A prominent example is the Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a Staph.A. strain that developed antibiotic resistance and is responsible for a good share of all nosocomial infections (i.e. infections you get that you get in hospital but are otherwise unrelated to your actual treatment there).
IANAMD (I am not an MD), but I have an education as combat medic in the Austrian Army where infectiology is a huge subject during education.
A monkey is doing the real work for me.
I'm no biologist, but isn't that just 'upping the ante'?
By making a service no current bug can live on, won't it leave a whole new world for tha one bug that happens to mutate in such a way to be tolerant(considering about divisions bacteria make with the percentage of mutation which is only likelier to increase given adverse conditions that may cripple its DNA). A la current anti-bacterial super-bug problem?
The problem is, when you mention bacteria to the average person, they think bad things because we've learned that bad bacteria can make us sick. That's why I hate most studies that proclaim the bacteria count is such and such.
Unfortunately, these "studies" are usually trying to convince us to buy an anti-bacterial soap, or as in this case a self cleaning mouse so they play on people's fears and doubts to make them want to buy it, ie... it's just FUD.
Interesting product, illiterate article.
Fomites (inanimate objects that can spread disease by holding infective organisms between hosts) can spread organisms, but office equipment, including mice and keyboards, has never been shown to contribute to the spread of serious disease. In a hospital environment, especially in something like an ICU where you have multiple providers working with the same computers, this might be an interesting thing to study. In the office, there's no point. You're at far more danger from shaking hands with your co-workers than you are from using their mouse. Tellingly, neither the author of the study nor the manufacturer quote any actual scientific study showing that an antibacterial mouse makes a difference anywhere. This is a talisman, pure and simple.
Which doesn't stop the writer of the article, who breathlessly refers to "the spread of pneumonia, the flu, pink eye and strep throat, among other extremely contagious viruses." As a physician who is continually explaining the difference between viruses and bacteria, and the difference between diseases caused by transmission of specific organisms (like strep) and general conditions that have hundreds of causes (like pink eye or pneumonia), this sentence made me twitch violently. Suffice it to say that with this single phrase, the author ensured that I would ignore the rest of the article as an obvious waste of time.
Fortunately, the manufacturer of the mouse did better. I love the disclaimer:
And there you have it. Remember, don't ingest the damn thing under ANY circumtances.
And of the other 3%, most of them we couldn't survive without and the primary way they can harm us is by dying. The human lifeform is symbiotic with a whole bunch of bacterial species, which do everything from cleaning your eyeballs to assisting with digestion. The biosphere relies on bacteria to maintain everything from soil conditions to oxygen levels in the atmosphere.
Killing bacteria to stop infections is like chopping off people's hands to stop shootings - before they happen.
Wouldn't it be easier to just make a copper mouse? Copper kills germs.
Plus after time your mouse will go from copper color to green, so you'll get 2 styles for the price of 1
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That must suck for Louisiana.
Resistant, sure. Aggressive, ??
Of course they're aggressive. You just killed their family, and tried to kill them. They're pissed, they're armed, and you gotta sleep sometime.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Except influenze is caused by a VIRUS, NOT a bacteria. How is this anti-bacterial mouse going to protect against the Flu?
The mark of a mature person is not creating arbitrary criteria for considering others mature.