The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Can your devices make you sick? Not likely, experts say
Our cellphones and laptops go everywhere with us. Because touching shared surfaces is a surefire way to encounter a variety of microbes, how worried should you be about getting sick from your phone or laptop?
No more worried than you would be about getting sick from touching your other personal objects, says Jonathan Eisen, a microbiologist and professor at the University of California at Davis. An object such as a subway handrail or computer keyboard can harbor microbes including pathogens — infectious organisms that cause disease — but those pathogens can make you sick only in the right environment and with the right transmission method.
If you’re the only person using your laptop and phone, and you use them in a normal, everyday environment such as your house or workplace, and you wash your hands and clean your devices regularly, you probably don’t need to be concerned; you’re basically sharing microbes with yourself, he says.
The risk increases when you’re actively transferring harmful microbes into your body or coming into contact with other people. For example, if you’re using a recipe on your computer and going back and forth between your keyboard and handling raw meat. In this case, you could be transferring a harmful microbe, such as E. coli or salmonella, onto the keyboard.
If someone sneezes on your phone and you touch it and then your mouth, you could get sick, but only because you touched your mouth.
But haven’t we been told that our phones are dirtier than a toilet seat? Maybe, but many studies that measure the presence of microbes on our devices (“swab tests”) fail to provide context for consumers, Eisen said. “Maybe it tells you something about how recently something was cleaned or how much food there is for the microbes in that particular environment, but it doesn’t tell you anything about the health risk.”