Dear All,

It's Friday evening and I ate an iffy salad at my local caff ... forgive the
disconnect between brain and send button forcing me to inflict two messages
on you rather than the one you deserve!

Here's some info on the dollar bill issue I mentioned in my last post. From
Addiction Research Center, National Institute on Drug Abuse, National
Institutes of Health, USA:

The exchange of illicit cocaine for money by drug dealers is an everyday
occurrence in cities in the United States. There is ample opportunity during
the exchange, storage, and use of cocaine for paper currency to become
contaminated. Because currency is exchanged frequently, it is likely that
contaminated currency would be found in common use. We examined ten single
dollar bills from several cities in the United States for the presence of
cocaine. Individual bills were extracted with methanol (10 mL). Cocaine was
purified from the methanol extract by solid-phase extraction (SPE). The SPE
extract was analyzed by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS).
Standard curves were constructed with new, uncirculated currency. Cocaine
was identified qualitatively by full scan and quantitated by selected ion
monitoring. Cocaine was present in 79% of the currency samples analyzed in
amounts above 0.1 micrograms and in 54% of the currency in amounts above 1.0
micrograms. Contamination was widespread and was found in currency from all
sites examined. Cocaine amounts were highly variable and ranged from
nanogram to milligram amounts. The highest amount of cocaine detected on a
single one-dollar bill was 1327 micrograms. These results indicated that
cocaine contamination of currency is widespread throughout the United States
and is likely to be primarily a result of cross-contamination from other
contaminated currency and from contaminated money-counting machines.

and:

"Seventy-eight percent of the one-dollar bills in the suburban Chicago area
are contaminated with cocaine," said chemist Jack Demirgian of Argonne's
Chemical Technology Division. "The number is about the same for paper
currency circulating in Miami and Houston, although the currency there tends
to have more cocaine on it.

For those of us who use currency notes to floss our teeth, the American
Society for Microbiology might make us think again:

One-dollar bills collected at a food concession stand at a high-school
sporting event and a check-out lane at a grocery store near Dayton, Ohio
were tested for bacterial contamination by Dr. Peter Ender and his
associates at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio.
They found that the majority of the 68 dollar bills they studied were
contaminated with the types of bacteria that can cause infection. Five bills
were contaminated with types of bacteria that commonly cause infections in
healthy people, and 59 were contaminated with types of bacteria that can
cause significant infections in hospitalized patients and those with
depressed immune systems. No bacterial contamination was detected on four
bills.

"One-dollar bills are widely used and each is exchanged many times," Ender
says. "If some are contaminated with bacteria, there is potential to spread
these organisms from person to person."



Duncan



----- Original Message -----
From: "Andy Beharrell" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, April 12, 2002 1:28 PM
Subject: Money


Anyone teaching money (functions / attributes etc) at the moment or in
the near future may be interested in a BBC article from yesterday:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/newsid_1921000/1921123.stm

The statistic that 'A BBC survey suggested that 99% of the £24.7bn
of notes in circulation in 1999 had traces of the drug cocaine on
them.' may also help your students be increasingly interested in money
as a topic as well!

Andy
----------------------
Andy Beharrell,
Biz/ed
Institute for Learning and Research Technology
8-10 Berkeley Square
Bristol BS8 1HH

Tel: 0117 928 7189

http://www.bized.ac.uk
http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk
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