Can your mobile phone or laptop make you sick? Probably not, experts say
- If you’re the only person using your devices and you wash your hands and clean your devices regularly, you probably don’t need to be concerned
- Here are the best ways to clean your device to reduce the risk of contracting any nasty bugs
Our mobile phones and laptops go everywhere with us – on trains, to the supermarket, to work, even to the bathroom. Because touching shared surfaces is a sure-fire 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.
An object such as a train handrail or computer keyboard can harbour 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.