Resumen de Travelling bugs value Romanian leu over dollars
Bills and coins can spread bacteria. Habip Gedik at the Okmeydani Training and Research Hospital in Istanbul, Turkey, and his colleagues in the Netherlands investigated how well bacteria survived on seven currencies: the euro, US dollar, Canadian dollar, Moroccan dirham, Croatian kuna, Romanian leu, and Indian rupee. The team sterilized banknotes of each currency before coating them with one of three types of bacteria: MRSA, VRE--another antibiotic-resistant bug that can cause hospital infections--or E. coli. None of the bacteria survived for longer than 3 hours on the kuna. But the leu provided a happy home for all three species for at least 6 hours, and MRSA was detectable on it 24 hours later.
