Elsewhere in The World
The longevity of most modern currency has also given rise to various fallacies regarding the transmission of bacteriological agents with paper banknotes. SARS cannot be spread via banknote, any more than AIDS can - though it bears noting that China’s concern in early 2003 that the deadly SARS virus could be spread by banknotes caused that country to automatically sequester surrendered notes for 24 hours (the presumed lifespan of the virus) before releasing them back into circulation.
The levels of contamination and the overall "dirtyness" of bills led Australia to introduce a plastic currency in 1988. These notes are less prone to contamination due to lack of the fabric that can hold crystalline structures that illicit drugs often take. Australia now prints polymer currency for almost two dozen other countries, including Israel, Malaysia, Mexico and Romania, as well as at home.
Read more about this topic: Contaminated Currency
Famous quotes containing the words the world and/or world:
“Is it not the chief disgrace in the world, not to be an unit;Mnot to be reckoned one character;Mnot to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the party, the section, to which we belong; and our opinion predicted geographically, as the north, or the south?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“This might be the end of the world. If Joe lost we were back in slavery and beyond help. It would all be true, the accusations that we were lower types of human beings. Only a little higher than apes. True that we were stupid and ugly and lazy and dirty and, unlucky and worst of all, that God Himself hated us and ordained us to be hewers of wood and drawers of water, forever and ever, world without end.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)