About seven percent of paper money may be contaminated with disease-causing bacteria, according to a study.
Researchers requested $1 bills from people in a grocery store and waiting in line at a concession stand.
They then soaked each bill, 68 in all, in a vial of brain-heart infusion broth for 30 to 60 minutes.
After the bill was removed, the broth was incubated, streaked onto an agar plate and incubated again. It was then monitored for growth of bacterial colonies.
The bills yielded 93 bacterial isolates and 94 percent of the bills had bacterial colonies.
Further, seven percent of the bills were contaminated with bacteria that could cause disease to hospitalized patients or patients with compromised immune systems, according to researchers.
Southern Medical Journal December 2002;95(12):1408-10
As I said in my comment on SARS a few weeks ago, I do not believe that bugs are responsible for the disease. It is absurd to me that so many incredible precautions are being implemented to protect against SARS.
It is equally absurd to see SARS capture such wide media attention. I regularly review about 200 articles a day through the wire services and as I write this comment this morning the first 15 stories in the Associated Press feed were all on SARS. The media attention on SARS is clearly distorted and out of control.
The experts are claiming that SARS is much more deadly than they first estimated. However, the experts absolutely ignore SARS evidence and fail to factor in the unknown number of cases that resolve without major symptoms, defeated by the person's own natural immunity. However, even if they wanted to factor in these cases, they wouldn’t be able to because the diagnostic tests for SARS are so terribly inaccurate.
The tests lack sensitivity and are not reliable. Many probable SARS cases turn out negative when tested, likely because the definition of SARS is so broad and includes symptoms that could be caused by other viruses.
Also, 300 people who were not thought to have SARS tested positive for the disease. There is serious doubt about whether the corona virus, which was presumed to be the cause of SARS, is actually the cause.
The corona virus is in only 30 percent of SARS cases. But, the virus was found in about 20 percent of a group of 250 people who were tested for the virus only because they had come from affected areas or had mild symptoms not thought to be SARS. This goes to show that the research surrounding the SARS theory, from its cause to its virility, is flawed.
Even as the SARS hysteria grows, many people were questioning the necessity of the Toronto travel advisory put out by the World Health Organization (WHO), and now the advisory has been lifted.
Further, the hype surrounding SARS is causing unwarranted panic. There is even a report of a person killing someone because he was afraid the person would pass SARS to him. This is insane.
If the information in this study was widely known, it is easy to imagine just as much paranoia about handling money as is being applied to SARS prevention.
Bacteria are all around us. There is no escaping them.
The problem results when you let the fear of the bacteria drive your behavior. There are many who are still afraid of using raw eggs because of salmonella even after reading the scientific reasons why salmonella from eggs is not a significant issue.
Normally I seek to keep the journal articles a bit more recent, but I found this one is reviewed in a traditional medical periodical, which explains the delay. The typical delay from publication of a study until the time it reaches the newsletter is about 20 days. Occasionally we will accelerate that time for a breaking news story.
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