New Delhi: The Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) has called for an investigation to assess the possibilities of diseases getting spread by currency notes. The traders’ body wrote a letter to Finance Minister Arun Jaitley demanding the investigation and precautionary measure. CAIT has cited various scientific reports that have indicated that currency notes carry all kinds of disease-causing micro-organisms.
According to several studies, currency notes are the carriers of fatal diseases. The researchers noted that currency notes carry dozens of micro-organisms that can cause diseases and infections, including tuberculosis, ulcers and dysentery.
Scientists at the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB) had earlier found traces of DNA footprints of at least 78 disease-causing micro-organisms on currency notes.
One of the reports quoted by CAIT was published in the Journal of Current Microbiology and Applied Sciences in 2016 revealed that 86.4% 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.