McDonald's Replacing Cashiers with Touch-Screen Tablets - Another Idiocracy Prophecy Come True!

[NewDeal_Dem]

38. Not so much.

Implications
I asked the microbiologist what to make of his team’s new findings. Did they uncover a hazard or was the contamination too low to matter?

Overall, Vriesekoop says, the number of bugs hiding out on a banknote tends to be small. But occasionally a hot bill will turn up. For instance, although the “bulk” of the 118 $5 and $20 bills that his team surveyed harbored no more than 10 CFUs per square centimeter, he notes that one or two hosted at least 10 times that many. So the occasional bill may indeed be relatively germy.

That said, he conceded that most of the bugs identified on the bills looked relatively harmless. Their presence, however, reinforces the potential for sickening contamination if the person who last handled a banknote was ill or had touched tainted food.

Finally, I asked what to make of all those nooks and crannies on bills made from cotton rag fibers. In a study I reported on several years back looking at cocaine contamination of banknotes, tiny drug particles were found lodged in microscopic fiber pockets on a U.S. dollar's surface. This suggested greenbacks might prove not only a good medium for collecting tiny particles, but also for sequestering them. If pocketed away securely enough, those pollutant particles might not rub off onto our hands once they had became embedded in a bill.

That’s also basically the argument proffered to explain data indicating that wood cutting boards are less likely than glass or plastic ones to contribute to the bacterial cross contamination of foods. The germs get into the crannies of wood’s fibers, investigations showed, and then either died or couldn't get out.

If the same proves true for germs on money, might that not suggest paper currency could be safer to handle than polymer bills, where the germs remain sitting on the surface with no grab bars to keep from rubbing off?

“We do not know!” Vriesekoop says, but “we are about to start another study wjere we will investigate the survival of bacteria on banknotes. Our current paper only represents a snapshot of what we found on the notes when obtained from a food outlet. Now, we want to know how long bacteria will stay alive when we place them on both cotton-based and polymer-based notes.

"Our prediction is that they stay alive longer on cotton-based notes.”

Clearly, more research is needed. But until more data become available, the new paper's authors argue that we’d all do well to play it safe and wash our hands after touching any money.

https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/science-public/dirty-money-1-expect-germs


Want another option?

You could move to Japan, where money is "laundered," literally.

One of Japan's leading banks, Sanwa, installed its first "clean ATM" machine at a branch in Tokyo in the mid-1990s. The ever-appreciative and clean-seeking Japanese flocked to the wonder machine, for the potential to have the cleanest money ever. Customers would insert their yens into the machine, which would then be treated to a heat process of 392 degrees, claiming to kill 90 percent of germs and bacteria before dispensing back to customers.

"What a novel idea," said McCarter. "Except, the minute you pick up that paper money again, it becomes contaminated with your normal flora!"

So much for clean money.

As for Gomez, he sized up that getting germs from money won't be a problem for him. Why?

"Because I always use a debit card."

http://chronicle.augusta.com/living/2010-06-28/how-bad-are-germs-money