Hotel-room surfaces can harbor viruses

From San Francisco, at the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy

Rhinovirus, which is responsible for roughly half of all common colds, survives on surfaces in hotel rooms for hours and can be transferred from there to people, a study shows.

J. Owen Hendley, a pediatrician at the University of Virginia School of Medicine in Charlottesville, and his colleagues obtained mucus samples from 15 people who had active rhinovirus infections.