
They’re right here, all around us.
Milling about, following our every move. No just stalking us – hanging on to our clothes, our skin, our hair, the immediate air around us.
Horror in the air
If you’ve seen the horrific pictures in the paper recently, you’ll know what we mean – the spray clouds of droplets and snot violently discharged by an ordinary everyday sneeze.
Germs, right? Billions and billions of them. Gross.
Except what we don’t see are the billions and billions more ejected in the “invisible gas phase” – tiny drops full of pathogens, hardly 10 micrometres across – small enough to spread 200 times further than previously thought, enough to cover any room and reach the ventilation ducts meant to purify them.
Yeah, shocking. We should all carry handkerchiefs. Stop this spread right before it starts.
Except it’s not just droplets from sneezes that are billowing in our office air.
Germs, germs, everywhere
Every one of us trails an invisible but teeming aura of microbes – bacteria, yeast, cells, and cell parts constantly given off by the body. A hodgepodge of good germs and bad, our own personal bio-signature.
All of which are in addition to the germs already in our office – lurking on desks and phones and everything else. As many as 10 million of them on every surface. A seething morass of common viruses and bacteria – e.coli, salmonella, clostridium difficile, campylobacter, the superbug MRSA, cold and flu viruses and norovirus – any one of which could put you in hospital or kill you altogether.
A daily threat just as deadly as any terrorist bullet. And we don’t even know it’s there.
OK, fine – the body’s immune system is hard at it, keeping all these bugs at bay. Most of the time nothing happens.
Until you start wondering why just about everybody in the office goes off sick four or five times a year – always an empty desk, colleagues out of action longer than their holidays – with a sick bill for country of £29 billion a year.
Uh huh. Worse than any terrorist opening up with an AK47. 1.8% of the population out of action – that’s 1.17 million people – and anything upwards of 2,000 deaths.
All-out counter attack
So what do we do about it?
If yours is the average office – vacuum the floors, empty the waste-baskets and wipe down the desks – that’s it.
Yeah right, we’re going to stop a terrorist attack with a dirty rag?
How about we bring in a Hypersteriliser and do the job properly?
Get everybody out at the end of the day – then mist the place up with ionised hydrogen peroxide, so that all those viruses and bacteria are oxidised to nothing.
Forty minutes a room, that’s all it takes. After which the whole place is sterile. No hovering bugs to breathe or touch – no residual sneezes to take us down.
Every surface – even the air itself – is totally germ-free. Including all those nasties left behind from greasy fingers (burgers for lunch, cream doughnuts at coffee break) on keypads and light switches.
OK, so we’ll bring a whole load new germs with us when we waltz in tomorrow – our personal bio-cloud never leaves us.
But we won’t catch any bug left behind from yesterday’s work session – not even from the unlucky ones who caught one already and aren’t making it in today.
Yeah, take that, terrorist germs!
We aren’t scared of you – get lost!