Germs in Your Home Office

Alex over at the shedworking blog highlighted a recent report that uncovers how our home-based working environments could be damaging our health. I’m a big fan of ergonomics as my Microsoft Natural Keyboard cured my RSI several years go. If I go back to a normal keyboard, my RSI comes back.

Think about the last time you cleaned your keyboard and mouse? And I don’t just mean shaking the biscuits you’ve dropped onto it over the last month, but a proper clean. I’ll bet you’ve never cleaned it properly since you took it out of its box.

According to Business Wire: Working from home provides many benefits, but a break from germs may not be one of them. According to a research study, home office surfaces are cluttered with millions of bacteria that could potentially cause illness.

In the new home version of “Germs in the Workplace,” researchers led by the University of Arizona’s Dr. Charles Gerba compared bacteria levels on common office surfaces in both home-office and traditional-office environments. Results are in and the desktops in the home-office harbor more bacteria than traditional-office desktops. In fact, more than four times as many bacteria were found on home desktops compared to traditional desktops. Many surfaces in traditional-offices still contain high levels of bacteria, but the study shows home-offices are surprising offenders.

“Although telecommuting offers many benefits like increased productivity and morale, and, of course, the luxury of working in your pajamas, home-office workers need to practice the same healthy habits as the rest of the workforce,” Gerba said.

As a homeworker I’ve constantly upgraded bits of my office as I strive for the perfect workstation. My mouse mat has been one of these quests. I never liked the hard surfaces mats, but came across the Microban range last year. After reading Alex’s post on his blog, I remembered that my mouse mat was anti-bacterial as it uses Microban technology that you may already be using in your kitchen on chopping boards for instance.

Microban also have a range of other office devices you can see from this link. Even if our home offices are filled with nasties, we can at least take steps to keep the pool of bacteria we all seem to work in at a minimum.

Filed Under: Health