05/09/2017 – Trinity option – Science

Grandma always made me wash my hands after I touched money. She was right: the first concerns that paper money might carry pathogens date back over a hundred years [Schaarschmidt 1884], and the first systematic study was just under fifty [Abrams 1972], when I was nine years old. (I don’t think, however, that my grandmother was familiar with these publications; rather, she was driven by simple common sense and, perhaps, the influence of her surgeon grandfather.) Early work relied on classical microbiological approaches and could only estimate the prevalence of culturable bacteria. It immediately became clear - however, as expected - that there are fewer bacteria on coins (13%) than on paper money...