Zee Media Bureau
New Delhi: This may come as a shocking news to some. Believe it or not but there are dozens of disease-causing micro-organisms travelling in your wallet, according to a group of scientists after studying notes of Rs. 10, Rs. 20 and Rs. 100 procured from markets in south Delhi.
According to The Indian Express report, traces of DNA footprints of at least 78 disease-causing micro-organisms on these notes have been found by scientists at the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB) and Industrial Research (CSIR).
It is believed that most of the micro-organisms were fungi, but bacteria that can cause dysentry, tuberculosis and ulcers were also visible.
Currency notes act as the carrier of disease-causing mirco-organisms on the notes and can also spread diseases, studies suggest.
To identify the taxonomy of micro-organisms on objects like clothes, furniture, soaps, even computers, a technology called Ribosomal RNA typing has been used.
“To be sure, the study only looked at finding traces of DNA. So we know what kind of organisms could have been on these notes. We do not know whether these organisms have the ability to infect people with the disease because we did not study that aspect. But what we can certainly say is that there is a possibility of diseases spreading through this manner because the microbes do actually travel through currency notes,” S Ramachandran, who led a group of five students for the project, told the leading English daily.
For the study, notes from different places like street vendors, grocery shops, snack bars and local markets in south Delhi were collected. After collecting, samples of the notes were put through the DNA sequencing technology and a bio-informatics algorithm was run on the results.
