A Study of Bacterial Contamination of Indian Currency Notes in Circulation

To determine the degree of contamination of currency notes that were in circulation in a local market in a town of Kanyakumari district in Tamil nadu, India.

One hundred currency notes of different denominations were randomly collected from sellers on the streets and market into sterile paper bags, shaken in universal bottles with 10ml sterile buffered peptone water, removed and the resulting peptone water incubated overnight and later sub-cultured onto Blood agar, MacConkey agar and incubated at 370C for 24 hours. Colonial Morphology, Gram Reactions and Biochemical tests were used for identification of isolates.

All 100 samples collected were contaminated with one or more bacteria representing 100%contamination. A total of 118 bacterial isolates were obtained from the 100 samples made up of 12 different bacterial species. Bacteria isolated from the notes were Bacillus species (33.07%), coagulasenegative staphylococci (26.04%), S. aureus (10.14%), E.coli (8.2%), Proteus species (5.4%), Enterococci species (4.3%) Citrobacter species (3.39%), ?-hemolytic Streptococci (2.7%), ?-hemolytic Streptococci (2.3%), Klebsiella pneumoniae (2.16%), Enterobacterspecies (1.4%) and Shigella species (0.9%). Ten non-circulated notes used as controls had no growth.

The study suggests that the Indian currency notes in circulation were found to be contaminated with pathogenic microorganisms which can spread human diseases. There should be public awareness of the fact that currency notes could be a source of infection and could be dangerous to health.