Research by laboratoire Pasteur :
Efficiency of biological cleaning of Tactys keyboards

The department specialising in hospital hygiene at the french laboratoire Pasteur in Lille conducted a study demonstrating the usefulness of Tactys keyboards in the fight against infections compared with the usefulness of keyboards made of silicone. Following artificial contamination with two different types of keyboard bacterial strains, the surfaces are cleaned using disinfectant wipes. 30 minutes later, the quantities of bacteria on the keyboards are measured again. This operation is performed three times for each bacterial strain and on the entire inventory. The study concludes that after disinfecting the surface, the average number of bacteria is reduced by 4 powers of ten (10,000 times) on a Tactys keyboard compared with 2 (100 times) on a silicone keyboard.

The scales are so different that it is difficult to represent them on a graph. To illustrate the gap in decontamination, if one germ per cm2 remains on the Tactys keyboard, then 170,000 remain on the silicone keyboard!