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Workplace Hazards By Richard Hollingham
A pretty barren and inhospitable place, right? But look closer. Your office actually is teeming with life, from silverfish infesting forgotten files, to cockroaches cleaning up the remains of lunch. They might not work 9 to 5, but, rest assured, they’re there. And their presence can have rather unpleasant consequences. “Body fragments from insects can be highly allergenic,” warns Ian Burgess, the director of the United Kingdom’s Insect Research and Development, a consultancy that specializes in insect-human relationships. “We’ve come across lots of people who suffer skin reactions caused by insect fragments,” he says. The static charge created by computer monitors can cause thousands of microscopic allergens to flow through the air, he adds. “The more of your life you spend in front of the screen, the worse the situation will be.” So where do the chief culprits live? Let’s start at the bottom. The larvae of the carpet beetle, Anthrenus flavipes, aka “woolly bears,” are around 3.5 millimeters long and covered in hundreds of tiny segmented hairs. While the beetle can ruin your rugs, the larvae can damage your health. The beetles lay their eggs in the carpet. In autumn, they hatch and make their way up the walls. “Because the hairs of these chubby, little larvae are segmented, bits break off and tiny fragments get into the air,” says Burgess. People who are allergic to these fragments can get very itchy skin. Working our way up from the floor, there’s a riot of activity happening on the seat of your chair. The warm, possibly moist conditions of the average office chair make it the perfect home for dust mites. These globular, hairy arachnids are related to ticks and spiders and live in close association with humans. Around half a millimeter across, they feed off dead skin infested with fungi, and although they don’t bite or harm us directly, their feces contain powerful allergens that happily make their way into our lungs. Dust mites are widely considered one of the most powerful triggers of asthma. One study carried out at the U.K.’s Building Research Establishment in 1993, and led by Gary Raw, a specialist on indoor air quality, found that office chairs are commonly infested with dust mites. The study suggested that when you sit down, a plume of dust-mite feces poufs out from the sides of your chair. And what about the surface of your desk itself? Though you might dust and wipe it down on a regular basis, it doesn’t take much for a nasty infestation to set in. Dave McLenachan, the Technical Manager for Rentokil IT Hygiene, based in Manchester, England, has a cautionary tale for anyone who thinks her desk is clean. “We visited quite a smart office the other day where this person had maggots crawling out of their keyboard,” he says. Flies had laid their eggs in the warm moist cracks between the keys. They took little longer than a weekend to hatch. Still convinced your hygiene standards are up to snuff? Try this: Turn your keyboard upside down and give it a good shake. Isn’t that an exciting collection of stuff? Hair, crumbs, sugar…possibly worse. All perfect snacks for flies, maggots, mites, silverfish and more. Equally worrying are the disease carriers. Cockroaches are not only highly allergenic — their dung and dead scales in particular — but they also come complete with a hoard of pathogens from drains, feces and carrion. According to McLenachan, the unseen hazards are the real horror story: fungi and bacteria. “There are 400 times more bacteria on a desktop than on a toilet seat,” says Charles Gerba, professor of microbiology at the University of Arizona in Tucson. “Offices are worse than public toilets.” And Gerba should know. He’s been studying pathogens in public restrooms since the mid-1970s. More recently, he’s been investigating the microbes that live in the workplace. “You won’t believe some of the desks I’ve seen,” he says. “We’re spending more time in the office than ever before and running a germ gauntlet every day.” His team took swabs from similar office work surfaces in five different U.S. cities: Atlanta in the humid south, Chicago in the colder north, New York on the east coast, San Francisco on the west and the dry southwest city of Tucson, Arizona. Samples were taken from offices, cubicles and conference rooms, and despite the geographic spread, the results were almost identical. The highest bacterial counts were on telephone handsets. McLenachan can back this finding with his own experience. “We recently went to a small business, and there was a guy there who had been off work for five months with an ear infection. His doctor concluded he caught it from a telephone.” Telephone handsets were closely followed by light switches and computer mice. In conference rooms, chair armrests topped the list, although the projector remote control was also heavily contaminated. This in itself is nothing much to worry about. After all, we are all covered in bacteria. “You can transmit bacteria and the flu and cold virus around the office and can very easily end up with more sick employees,” warns Gerba. He uses an alcohol spray and disinfectant wipes on his own desk. No dirty desk would be complete without the half-full coffee cup, an ideal breeding ground for furry fungi and bacteria. “Coffee is a perfect biological substrate,” says Gerba, who uses disposable cups in his office. “Our study found that in a used coffee cup there are anywhere between 5,000 and 300,000 bacterial cells.” Gerba concentrated his research on the cups abandoned in communal office kitchens, most of which, he says, hadn’t been cleaned properly and had crusty brown stains. He found that 41 percent of the cups contained evidence of fecal contamination, with up to one in five harboring Escherichia coli bacteria, a potential source of food poisoning. “Funnily enough, the higher up the administrative chain the cup’s owner was, the more bacteria there were in the cups.” This he can’t explain. And it’s not just bacteria we should be afraid of. “I’ve seen some coffee cups that get furry enough to produce airborne spores — that is a problem for people with allergic asthma,” says Peter Thorne, professor of toxicology at the University of Iowa College of Public Health. The odors from mold growth, apart from being unpleasant, also can cause problems for asthma sufferers. Thorne’s warning for anyone who thinks that keeping a plant by their desk improves their working environment: “Plants, particularly those in wicker baskets, get wet and moldy and you get spores released.” The carpet around the water cooler can also prove a fertile breeding ground for fungi and bacteria. So, does all this mean you need to start working from home? Anthony Hilton, a microbiologist at Aston University in Birmingham, U.K., has little time for alcohol sprays or disinfectant wipes. “The human mouth is full of micro-organisms,” he says. “People kiss each other and don’t drop dead. We’ve evolved through millions of years to coexist with microbes. Why should we feel the need to kill all of them when many don’t do us any harm?” Hilton has a point. If this really is a problem, why don’t office workers constantly fall sick with bacterial infections and asthma attacks? He recently oversaw a study investigating the bacteria that live on computer keyboards. If they were present, that would indicate fecal contamination. The keyboards in question were located in one of the university’s busy computer labs. Each terminal is used by at least 20 different students every day. The researchers took swabs from the “A” and “Z” keys of 120 keyboards. Not surprisingly, they found evidence of more bacteria — around 150 cells — on the frequently pressed “A” key and only around 30 cells on the less frequently used “Z.” Most of these were likely to be from skin: Staphylococcus aureus and S. Only 3 percent of “A” keys sampled showed Enterobacteriaceae contamination. Pretty good odds, it would seem, if you bite your nails or like to eat while working. So what steps should we be taking before we brave the workplace? For Hilton, it’s all a question of reasonable precautions: Don’t assume everyone else is as clean as you, particularly if you’re sharing facilities. “You need to implement a hygiene strategy into your own life, assuming everyone else is grubby,” Hilton advises. “No matter what you’ve been doing, wash your hands before you eat.” Clean up after yourself if you eat at your desk, recommends Thorne. “As well as promoting bacteria, there’s also the chance of attracting vermin such as cockroaches, ants, mice and rats.” He says businesses shouldn’t skimp on cleaners and suggests we could all cut down on clutter. © 2006 New Scientist Magazine, Reed Business Information Ltd. |
Next time you’re bored at work, take a good look around your desk — computer, screen, paper piles, assorted clutter, telephone and that three-day-old cup of…maybe…coffee.