AAAR 35th Annual Conference October 17 - October 21, 2016 Oregon Convention Center Portland, Oregon, USA
Abstract View
Investigation of Possible Transmission of Infectious Diseases via Contaminated Cell Phones
CAIJIA XU, Maosheng Yao, Peking University
Abstract Number: 502 Working Group: Bioaerosols
Abstract In recent years, smartphones are widely used in the world and have become a life necessity. Previous studies focused on the concentration, species and pathogenicity of bacteria on the smartphone screens in clinical environment. However, smartphones may also be a source of pathogenic bacteria in daily life. People who have a fever or cold may release pathogens to their smartphone screens by coughing, sneezing or touching. Accordingly, the smartphones become a pathogen carrier and pose a health threat to friends or family members. In this study, smartphone screen swabs and throat swabs from patients with fever or cold were taken. The swab was eluted with 1.5 mL sterile water and DNA was extracted from the elution. Then loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) was used to detect common respiratory tract pathogens such as Haemophilus influenza, Methicillin-resistant Stphylococcus aureus and so on. Our preliminary results showed nearly 10% of smartphones from flu patients studied were contaminated by Haemophilus influenza. The results indicated that cell phone from flu patient could pose potential health risks to other healthy people. Further improvement of the method including washing bacteria from the cell phone can also lead to an innovative method for screening infectious agents for flu patient.