Germs on Coins and Bank Notes
Coins and bank notes can carry germs, but research suggests the risk of getting sick from handling physical currency is far smaller than you might think.
Do germs linger on coins? Even U.S. coin dealer Samuel Chapman voiced concern when the incuse-design Indian $2.50 quarter eagle and $5 half eagle coins were introduced.
Here we go again. The prestigious Cleveland Clinic has become the latest organization in a long line that has studied coins and bank notes and concluded that germs are likely living on our physical currency.
The good news is that the Cleveland Clinic states in its May 29 article that infectious disease specialist Kruti Yagnik, DO, says its “it’s extremely unlikely that your money will make you sick, and you definitely don’t need to wash dollar bills or coins.”
According to the clinic article, “Dr. Yagnik says you’re more likely to make yourself sick reading about contaminated money than you are to get sick from touching it.”
Perhaps of even more interest is the doctor’s comment that “Even things that don’t circulate widely, like your credit cards, still frequently pass from your hands to someone else’s, back and forth. Wallets and handbags are hot spots for germs, too.”
The article does ask the question: why is money such a good carrier? “High touch surfaces” include both coins and bank notes, according to the article; however, so are door handles, car keys, and even that telephone you just swiped rather than pay in cash or by handling a credit card. According to Yagnik, “Even for highly infectious conditions like COVID-19, the risk of actually getting sick from touching money is extremely small.”
Yagnik explained that in a 2022 study, participants sick with COVID-19 coughed on a dollar bill, then handed the note to volunteers who touched it and then their faces. The study found that COVID-19 would successfully transmit through cash handling fewer than once in 107 years. In the same study, the risk to cashiers handling coins and bank notes was also very low, in this case being estimated at 21 months.
It’s refreshing to see an article that defends rather than demonizes coins and bank notes as disease carriers. Studies on coins carrying diseases in publications and websites like Scientific American, the Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation, and Medscape argue otherwise and are, unfortunately, most likely to be remembered by the public.
Where did this mysophobia come from? As far back as the 1665 Great Plague in London, coins were being dropped in vinegar to disinfect them. In 1884, German researcher E. Schaarschmidt theorized that metal coins and paper bank notes were fomites for spreading contagious diseases.
Prominent Philadelphia coin dealer Samuel Chapman was sufficiently concerned when the incused design Indian $2.50 quarter and $5 half eagle coins were introduced in the United States in 1908 that he called the coins “a great receptacle for dirt and conveyor of disease, and the coin(s) will be the most unhygienic ever issued.”
Studies through which it was concluded coins and bank notes carry “potentially harmful” germs thrived particularly during the 1970s to the 1990s. A 2016 “dirty money” study concluded that the surface of a coin is naturally hostile to bacteria. The “Oligodynamic Effect,” according to the study, causes bacteria to die quickly on silver and copper coins, while bacteria die more slowly on polymer or cotton-linen composition bank notes.
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