germs

Quick! Which keys on your keyboard are the filthiest? The most infested with nasty germs?

Come on down, E, S, T, return, and space bar! You're the most likely to harbor abhorrent bugs like E. coli. We need you to communicate but hate your freeloaders. What to do?

Enter the Influsaber, an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.

This wand from Japan's J-Force slays bugs with ultraviolet rays, namely UV-C light, which can penetrate the outer walls of viruses and bacteria, altering their genetic structure and killing them. … Read more

Poor mail carriers. Not only do they have to put up with threatening dogs and foul weather, but they spend their days touching what may be one of our dirtiest everyday objects: mailbox handles.

The only worse offender? Gas pump handles.

So says a new study by researchers at hygiene solutions firm Kimberly-Clark Professional, who took more than 350 swabs from a variety of everyday objects in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami, and Philadelphia to measure ATP (Adenosine Triphosphate) levels commonly used to detect contamination.

While they did not distinguish between contamination types (i.e. molds versus bacteria), they … Read more

Tossing clothes into the wash when dirty is so last year, thanks to a discovery by chemists out of the University of California at Davis. Near-ordinary cotton may simply need be exposed to light to get busy killing bacteria and breaking down toxic chemicals such as pesticide residues.

Ning Liu, a doctoral student at UC Davis, worked with textile chemists Gang Sun and Jing Zhu to develop a method that incorporates a compound (2-AQC) into cotton fabrics. When exposed to light, it produces reactive oxygen species such as hydrogen peroxide that kill bacteria and break down toxins.

While Liu says 2-AQC is more expensive than other compounds, it is difficult to remove from cotton due to strong bonding, and cheaper equivalents should work, too.

"The new fabric has potential applications in biological and chemical protective clothing for health care, food processing, and farm workers, as well as military personnel," she says.

The team reported on its findings in the Journal of Materials Chemistry last month, shortly before another study out of the University of Iowa chronicled the vast presence of even drug-resistant disease-causing bacteria on hospital curtains.… Read more

In recent years, you may have seen a story or two about how toilet seats are cleaner than your cell phone. Well, there may not be an app for eliminating those teeming germs from your mobile, but Violight, a company that specializes in UV toothbrush sanitizers, has developed something called the Cell Phone Sanitizer to execute microbes.

Violight says it's the first UV sanitizing device designed to "eliminate up to 99.9% of germs and bacteria on your cell phone," as well other small electronic devices, including earbuds and Bluetooth headsets.

According to the company, the germicidal … Read more

You may not know it, but deep within the ivory towers of hospitals a debate is raging over the future of the doctor's necktie. One company has turned the debate into an opportunity with a tie whose stain-resistant coating actually thwarts microbes.

Much evidence has emerged in recent years that doctors wearing ties might actually cause as much harm to patients as doctors who don't wash their hands. In one 2004 study of 42 doctors and medical staffers at the New York Hospital Medical Center of Queens, almost 50 percent of the neckties were host to bacteria that … Read more

Worried about germs populating your peripherals? You may dream of giving them a nice bath now and then.

Go ahead, with the MW-2800 washable optical mouse from Cherry, a ZF Electronics brand.

The mouse is targeted at hospitals, clinics, schools, manufacturing lines, and other venues where many people tend to share workstations.

The MW-2800 is not the first washable mouse. Two years ago, Belkin introduced its F5L007 mouse with the scroll wheel replaced by a touch area that allows both vertical and horizontal scrolling.

On Cherry's new MW-2800, scrolling is done with sealed scroll-lock buttons. It's supposed to … Read more

Samsung has announced a 10-inch Netbook which, among other things, kills bacteria. The N310 has been styled by award-winning Japanese designmeister Naoto Fukasawa and will presumably be welcomed with open--but latex-gloved--arms by OCD sufferers.

It boasts a frameless 10-inch screen and pebble design keyboard, which Samsung reckons is 93 percent of the size of a desktop keyboard for easy typing.

The N310 weighs about 2.6 pounds with a four-cell battery, which Samsung claims will give you up to five hours without busting out some mains supply. Battery savings come from the LED display and optimized performance from the Intel … Read more

Perhaps you, too, have friends who go nowhere without their hand sanitizer. Perhaps you, too, laugh at them beneath your clenched top lip.

However, researchers at Ondokiz Mayis University in Turkey are discovering that germs lurk everywhere. Especially in cell phones belonging to doctors and nurses, according to an Agence France Presse report. In fact, these phones may be a significant source of infections such as MRSA, which seems to have become an increasing danger in hospitals all over the world.

In researching the cell phones and dominant hands of 200 doctors and nurses, the researchers found that 95 percent … Read more

Germs. Those nasty little pests that seems to crawl up into anything and everything. To make matters worse, we can't even see them, lurking there in the dark. Well, now we can fear them no longer. Shine a light (literally) into those dark corners and 99.99 percent of the little bugs will be gone. At least gone from your knife set if you use The Germ Eliminating Knife Block from Hammacher Schlemmer.

The knife block uses UV-C light to disrupt the nasty goings-ons of microscopic critters like salmonella, listeria, and staphylococcus. This is the same method that hospitals … Read more