Of bacteria, crumbs and QWERTY.
Scott Ard Former Editor in Chief, CNET
CNET former Editor in Chief Scott Ard has been a journalist for more than 20 years and an early tech adopter for even longer. Those two passions led him to editing one of the first tech sections for a daily newspaper in the mid 1990s, and to joining CNET part-time in 1996 and full-time a few years later.
The innards of most computer keyboards look a lot like the bottom of a restaurant toaster oven. But it's the gunk you can't see that has hospitals increasingly worried about the keyboard's role in spreading disease.
A study at Chicago's Northwestern Memorial Hospital found that keyboards make comfy hosts for a variety nasty germs, a growing worry as more hospitals put computers in patient rooms and adopt more electronic record keeping. As part of the study, reported here, two common types of bacteria common to hospitals were found to survive more than 24 hours between the keys.
After they figure out how to protect patients from grimy keyboards, hospital administrators might have to turn their attention to the TV remote controls in every room.