Thank god we're all descendants of Golgafrincham and their telephone sanitisers. Otherwise this article might scare me.

Seriously now, does it really matter? Toilet seats regularly get cleaned with some pretty viscous chemicals - of course they're going to be clean. So what if toilets are cleaner than desks? I know for a fact that my desk isn't all that unclean. I wouldn't be scared to eat food that had been sat on my desk. In fact I have done many times in the past and I'm still not dead.

This is another prime example of the media trying to scare people. For some reason the media seem to enjoy instilling fear in the public. For one thing it has been shown time and time again that living in too clean an environment is actually as detremental as living in a filthy environment, because it lowers the body's tolerance to bacteria. Asthma and Eczma have been linked to households that are cleaned too much.

More importantly the article refers to cold and flu bugs. Everyone gets a cold every now and then, there's nothing that can be done about it. It's just a part of every day life. Disolving your phone, keyboard, mouse and desktop with powerful detergents every day is not going to make that much of a difference to your health.

That said, the keyboards, mice and desktops in some of the computer rooms at UWA really do need this treatment. But they're shared computers - would you use a public loo if it didn't get cleaned on a regular basis?