DESKS OF DISGUST:Your office work surface may be home to a higher concentration of bacteria than a typical toilet seat

摘要

THINK YOUR desk looks tidy Office buildings, cleaned daily, seem an unlikely habitat for pathogens. But although your workspace may appear neat, a menagerie of micro-organisms roams the wilderness of your desk. Scavenging across the peaks and valleysof your keyboard, traversing the plains of your mouse and reproducing prolifically in your coffee cup - microbes are everywhere.Professor Charles Gerba, at the University of Arizona in the USA, has spent much of his career collecting bacteria from everyday surfaces. He's swabbed everything from filing cabinets to lift buttons and his most famous finding is an unsettling one. "Thesafest place from germs in the office is the toilet seat," Charles says. "No-one cleans their desktops. There are 400 times more bacteria on [the worst] desktops than on a toilet seat." Toilets are usually sprayed daily with disinfectant, but desks arerarely wiped.