BehindTheMedspeak: As if computer viruses weren't enough, now come computer bacteria — and these can kill you

No joke: Dr. Gary Noskin of Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago earlier this week presented a paper at the annual scientific meeting of the Society for Health Care Epidemiology in Los Angeles which demonstrated convincingly that two potentially lethal strains of bacteria — methicillin-resistant Staphlococcus aureus (MRSA) and vancomycin-resistant enterococcus (VRE), both found primarily in hospitals — can survive and continue to grow on computer keyboards for over 24 hours.

The drug-resistant bacteria are then transmissible to the fingers, bare or gloved, of subsequent nurse and doctors who use the keyboards.

Making the finding even more disturbing is the fact that increasingly, the trend toward electronic record keeping and computerized order entry means that in more and more hospitals, computers are in each patient's room, providing a potentially devastating route for infection transmission.

The only solution is the old one: washing one's hands before and after every patient encounter and now — every computer interaction as well.