Official News - page 9

REAL LIFE NEWS: THE BUG-FIGHTING KEYBOARD

by Hazed

Normally when you hear the word "bug" in association with computers, it means errors in a program, but in hospitals bugs mean something very different, and superbugs are particularly worrying. Now a London hospital has come up with a computer keyboard that could help in the fight against superbugs.

Superbugs are bacteria that have become immune to standard anti-biotic treatment, and hospitals which are, by definition, full of ill people with little resilience to disease, have a particular problem when superbugs get out of control. Stopping them involves stringent cleaning methods to make sure the bugs can't lurk in crevices where they can breed. Computer keyboards, of course, traditionally have lots of little crevices - all those gaps between the keys can be very difficult to keep clean.

So researchers at the University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust have come up with a "clean" keyboard that doesn't have the little crevices, and is therefore much easier to keep clean. The keyboards are much smoother than conventional ones and are equipped with timing devices to warn nursing staff when they need cleaning. To fight the bugs they need to be cleaned properly using alcohol wipes at least every 12 hours.

The idea was devised by consultant microbiologist Dr Peter Wilson and clinical scientist Dr Paul Ostro. "Doctors and nurses were going from patient to the keyboard without washing their hands," said Dr Wilson. "That's quite understandable because you would wash your hands between patients but not between a patient and a keyboard. As we are going to be increasingly using computers we thought we would have to come up with a model that was very easy to clean to try to break the cycle of infection."

The hospital trust is now installing the new keyboards on hospital wards, where it should help prevent outbreaks of superbugs.

This sounds like an excellent innovation, and if it proves to be successful I hope it'll be introduced in all hospitals.

Fed2 Star index Previous issues Fed 2 home page