Sudhakar Jha
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Written By: Sudhakar Jha | Published : September 3, 2018 7:07 PM IST
Research says that currency notes may also carry lots of micro-organisms that can cause diseases and infections, including tuberculosis, ulcers and dysentery © Shutterstock
We all keep the notes in our wallets and use them at our peril. But all those notes might actually be giving you diseases that you may not even have thought about. And we are not saying it, and neither is this a new trick from the government to take your notes back!
Because according to a new research, currency notes carry lots of micro-organisms that can cause diseases and infections, including tuberculosis, ulcers and dysentery.
Quoting various scientific reports that have indicated that currency notes carry all kinds of disease-causing micro-organisms, traders body, The Confederation of All India Traders wrote to the the Finance Minister to take steps to protect people from the contamination of currency notes. The traders body said that it is regretted to note that no cognizance has been taken by the government about this serious public health issue.
Scientists at the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB), under the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) found DNA paths of about 78 disease-causing micro-organisms on the currency notes. While most of these organisms were found to be fungi, the study also saw traces of bacteria that can cause dysentery, tuberculosis and ulcers.
In another report published in the Journal of Current Microbiology and Applied Sciences, it was claimed that about 86.4 per cent of the 120 currency notes tested at the department of microbiology, Tirunelveli Medical College, Tamil Nadu, were contaminated with disease-causing pathogens such as Klebsiella pneumoniae, staphylococcus aureus and E Coli.
