By Natasha Lomas, 29 November 2007 15:38
NEWS
Take a look at your keyboard. Is last week's lunch still decorating the space bar? What about your phone? Does the earpiece look as greasy as a spoon in a truckers' café?
Office equipment harbours millions of germs - with telephones, keyboards and mice particularly fertile breeding grounds for nasties, claims IT equipment cleaning company PROtech IT Hygiene.
The average office desk is capable of supporting some 10 million microbes, said the cleaning company, and there are nearly 21,000 microbes per square inch in the average office.
Unsurprisingly, the filthiest equipment is the hardware that gets handled most. Telephones are the worst offenders, holding up to 25,127 microbes per square inch, while computer keyboards, which are well placed to catch morsels of lunch, sneezes and dead skin and hair, can be germ-ridden to the tune of 3,295 microbes per square inch and mice can harbour up to 1,676.
Enough dead skin falls off a human in a day to fill a teacup, according to the company, which said some cold and flu viruses can survive on surfaces for up to 72 hours.
Unclean office equipment can not only increase absenteeism among staff by exposing them to germs that cause colds and flu but may also cause the hardware itself to malfunction, the company warned.
While disinfecting equipment might be simple, getting staff to clean themselves is probably much harder: 31 per cent of men and 17 per cent of women admit they do not wash their hands after going to the toilet.
Comments
There are 6 comments. Join the discussion
1. anonymous
10 million bacteria is about the number you can find in a gram of uncooked hamburger.
Most of the bugs you'll find on office furniture and equipment come from the (mostly) healthy people using them and are normal. Some of them will come from office plants or whatever they're planted in.
If you want to stop people giving each other diseases, the only only way is to make them stay at home when they're sick.
2. Roger Huffadine
BUT - these are the very microbes that keep you healthy.
Without a comprehensive array of antibodies we soon become ill - antibodies are produced as a result of exposure to invasive pathogens.
Cleaning telephones ultimately reduces profit by spending unnecessary money on cleaning and making staff more sick than they would have been if you hadn't cleaned the phones.
[on a soapbox] == look at the rise in Asthma since the clean air act came into being. When I was a kid if we had a congested nasal tract our mums would get out the Wrights Coal Tar vapouriser and fill our bedrooms with coal tar!! vapour. Outside we had 'dirty air' but very little asthma - our bodies had already compensated and produced a robust and healthy child immune to the 'nasty' atmosphere.
3. Zakala
This sounds like a plea from telephone sanitizers not to be launched into space with the hairdressers and estate agents.
[Apologies to the late, and sorely missed, Douglas Adams.]
4. Mark Hosey
My keyboards as clean a a whisle. The cockroaches see to that.
5. Ralph
"enough dead skin cells....to fill a tea-cup"
Excuse me whilst I snort!
How big is this tea-cup? Is it a British standard size tea-cup, of 10 fl. oz.? Or a girly USA 8 fl.oz.? Is it made of bone-china?
Is this output of just the one human, or 6,000 million of them?
Who colected all the skin cells up and how many cups were actually filled?
Is it a slow news day in Silicon towers?
How much does 10 fl. oz of dead skin cells weigh? At standard Earth type gravity at sea level of course.
How many of these microbes, are actually feeding on my dead skin and are they likely to be injurious to my health?
6. anonymous
How many IT staff suffer illnesses from dirty IT equipment?
IT staff end up working at most peoples machines using the mouse and keyboard at those machines.
Just how many IT professional fall ill because of these "Dirty" pieces of equipment?
If they do fall ill could they claim an industrial accident/illness ?