Opinion Filthy lucre
Your mother was right. If you touch money, you must wash your hands
Currency notes are crawling with bugs — at least 78 species, mostly fungi, are flourishing in this rich habitat, steaming luxuriantly in damp human pockets.
Money is the prime mover of almost everything, but no one had suspected it of being a disease vector that moves pathogens from host to host, or at least from pocket to pocket. No one except the South Asian mother, who always warned that money is filth. She has inflicted handwashing syndromes on her children and left them so uncomfortable about money that they are ambivalent about making it.
But now, a study by the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology has found that Mother was right. Currency notes are crawling with bugs — at least 78 species, mostly fungi, are flourishing in this rich habitat, steaming luxuriantly in damp human pockets. Of course, the evidence is not conclusive since the study only searched for the DNA fingerprint of pathogens. It only proves that the rupee notes examined had come into contact with those pathogens. It does not necessarily mean that they were capable of causing an infection. Indeed, they could have been attenuated by age, sunlight or a number of other factors, including the odd cosmic ray wandering in from deep space.
The possibilities for further research are interesting. Is black money dirtier than white money, and is blood money altogether disgusting? Do societies with a preference for cash exhibit higher rates of morbidity and mortality? How long does it take for a freshly printed note to be tainted by crass commerce? But then, these questions may soon recede into the pages of economic history as the Reserve Bank of India prepares to launch its own research project, with Arun Jaitley rooting strongly for it. It proposes to flood five cities with a billion Rs 10 notes made of synthetic polymer. Now, that would give plastic money a whole new meaning, and give the bugs something new to adapt to.
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