UW students find fecal coliform on campus keyboards

E-mail may not be all that's at your fingertips if you use computers at the University of Washington — or for that matter, if you touch public keyboards just about anywhere.

As part of a research project, eight UW students have discovered high levels of fecal coliform, the bacteria found in fecal matter, on keyboards at the two busiest computer areas on campus — Odegaard Undergraduate Library and Mary Gates Hall.

Keyboards at Odegaard were cleaned Thursday, the day after an article about the findings was printed in the UW student paper, The Daily, said UW spokesman Bob Roseth.

Library officials said the keyboards would now be cleaned on a weekly basis and that they are looking at ways to make sure all public keyboards on campus are sanitary.

The discussion comes amid a general growing awareness of the nasty things we pass around on shared surfaces such as gym benches, telephones and grocery-cart handles.

Raising awareness that there are risks associated with keyboards is important, especially in places like hospitals where nurses and doctors use them after treating patients, said Gwy-Am Shin, an associate professor at the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences.

Shin, faculty supervisor for the research project, and the students are the first to acknowledge that their testing was rudimentary and limited. Only 30 keyboards were tested, the samples taken from each were minuscule, and swabbing is not the most sophisticated gathering technique.

Time also was a factor, Shin said. Students spent several weeks learning how to collect and interpret data before taking their samples and completing the project by the end of this past quarter.

Still, "our study was kind of the first to demonstrate the importance of hygiene in public schools," Shin said. The presence of fecal coliform is an indicator that other pathogens may be lurking on the keyboards — such as E. coli bacteria, which can cause stomach cramps, diarrhea or worse, or forms of the virus that causes hepatitis.

Along with fecal coliform, the students were looking for strains of Staphylococcus aureus, or staph, as well as the antibiotic-resistant strain of the bacteria, MRSA. They were unable to detect those, possibly because of their limited methods, the students said.

Seattle Public Library and Children's Hospital & Regional Medical Center say they are aware of the potential health risks keyboards pose.

At the library's Central Branch, all 378 public keyboards are wiped daily, cleaned thoroughly once a week and put through the dishwasher once a month on a rotating schedule.

"I think people are so much more aware of staph, and other bacteria and viruses now, whether at the grocery store or at the gym," said library spokeswoman Andra Addison. "I think there's just a higher consciousness of it ... you have to be aware of those types of issues."

The keyboards are not harmed by the dishwasher, Addison added, as long as they are unplugged when they go in. Some computer-makers advise against that practice.

At Children's Hospital, keyboard covers are used and wiped daily, said Danielle Zerr, medical director of infection control. Just as important, however, is hand hygiene.

"[What these students found] is not surprising," she said. "These are organisms that people are carrying on their bodies, and they're not practicing hand hygiene."

At Children's, Zerr said, hand hygiene is taken seriously. "We have observers watching people leave a patient's room to see whether they use a hand sanitizer."

Ninety percent of the doctors and nurses are observed doing so immediately, she said, which "goes a long way in preventing what happens around a keyboard."

At the UW, dispensers of hand sanitizer available at the door at the Mary Gates computer lab likely were a factor in the lower levels of fecal coliform there compared to the undergraduate library.

Danny Ormeni, one of the eight students in the research group, came up with the idea to swab keyboards after brainstorming with his classmates.

"One idea was to swab the scrubs that doctors use," he said. "Then I thought of something more — I noticed that every time I went to Odegaard, I saw that the computers were always dirty, and people were eating by them and it was just so disgusting."

The students hope that more long-term research will be done.

"I wish we had had a longer time, and I wish we had taken more samples because I have a feeling that we would have found more staph aureus, and I think it would have validated our results more," said Stephanie Wong, another of the eight in the group.

Zerr, the medical director of infection control at Children's, supports efforts to develop self-sanitizing keyboards as a way to curtail hospital-acquired diseases like MRSA.

Ken Sullivan is founder of VioGuard, a Seattle company that's hoping to have such a keyboard on the market early in 2009.

"Our intent is to completely eliminate the keyboard as a source of cross-contamination in hospitals," he said.

Arla Shephard: 206-515-5632 or ashephard@seattletimes.com