Imagine someone hands you a pile of hundred-dollar bills. It’s thrilling, holding all that money. You think about how you’ll spend it. Or the number of zeros it will add to your bank account. You count it, lining up the bills so you can flip through the smug visage of Benjamin Franklin. You hold it up to your nose, breathing in that familiar scent of cotton, ink, and metal, then tuck it away for safekeeping. And while you are laying it beneath your favorite lingerie in your underwear drawer, what you’re probably not thinking about is all the filth covering those bills.

Paper money is dirty. And once you learn what it carries around on its surface, you may never want to touch it again.

Brand new bills start off clean and fresh, like all newborns, at a part of the Department of the Treasury called the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. The stock paper, created by Crane Curreny, a division of Crane Holdings, isn’t really paper at all. While paper is made of wood pulp, currency is made from a blend of 25% linen and 75% cotton, with red and blue fibers scattered throughout to prevent counterfeiting. Sheets are then printed with different inks–green on the back, black on the front, and metallic and color-shifting ink on other parts depending on the denomination. Completed sheets are then passed through guillotine cutters into currency size. Bricks of 4,000 bills are shrink-wrapped and delivered to Federal Reserve banks and other locations. Together, the two printing locations in Washington, DC and Fort Worth, TX create a total of 38 million bills a day. Each of these bills goes out into the world to have its own adventure.

Let’s follow the adventure of a one-dollar bill. For obvious reasons, we’ll call him George.

George wakes up one day and finds himself supine, atop a pile of fellow bills in a cash register. It’s dark and cramped, but he feels a sense of anticipation. Excitement is up ahead!

Suddenly, his tray thrusts forward, and there is a blinding light. A hand lifts him up and passes him to another, larger hand. It’s warm and smells like orange rinds and coffee. He takes a deep breath, catching glimpses of marble, steel, and other people. As he starts to get his bearings, he’s shoved into a wallet, with a pile of other bills. Everything goes dark again.

Although he can’t see much, he feels the irregular edges of the bills around him. One has a tear that’s been repaired with a strip of tape. Another is wilted and thin. They are quiet and grumpy. And the smell–there’s definitely some leather, but he can’t quite place the rest of it. Floral undertones of soap? Is that musk oil?

He doesn’t have long to settle in. Moments later, he’s pulled from the wallet and thrown into a tin can. He hears the bustling sounds of a city street and smells the scent of car exhaust and marijuana. He feels something pushing into his back. It’s hard with ribbed edges. The hot sun beats down on him, making his brow sweat.

After what seems like an eternity (but is really 7 hours), a hand reaches into the can and turns into a fist, crumpling him and several other bills into a ball. A stench that can only be described as human-adjacent makes his eyes tear. He blocks his nose, gasping for air through his mouth, inadvertently filling it with an unspeakable flavor. If he didn’t know better he would say it was feces.

Just when he thinks he’s going to pass out, the hand unfurls, throwing him into another hand in exchange for a tiny plastic bag. He takes a deep breath to clear his lungs just before he’s shoved into another pocket. Stretching himself out, he falls through a hole in said pocket and onto the street.

The night is cold and long. The concrete sidewalk is hard, but at least he can breathe in the night air. Shivering and afraid, he finally falls asleep. He is so tired that he barely notices the bottoms of shoes that step on him or the breeze that floats him to a nearby flowerbed, gently laying him next to a yellow tulip.

He wakes from a dream where he is taking a hot shower. It is so vivid, he struggles to make sense of the furry underside and lifted leg of the dog standing over him. Sputtering under ammonia-scented liquid, he collapses back into sleep, wishing he could be back in the cash register. For weeks, he lays there, suffering daily visits from more dogs, rats who feign interest, and a particularly aggressive nest of flies who find his odor intoxicating.

One day, his luck changes when a city worker happens by. She is there to plant more flowers when she notices George, face up and worse for wear. She gingerly picks him up and folds him into her pocket. When she gets home, she opens a perfume-scented scarf and lays him on top of other bills she’s rescued. George stays there for many months. He will remember those as the best days of his life.

It is a Sunday when everything changes. He and his family of bills are thrown into a purse and taken on a long journey. They go through an airport, security checks, and several time zones before landing in their new home. The air is cleaner. He can smell the ocean.

Once home, he and his family of bills are made into piles and secured with rubber bands. Stacks of bills as far as his eye can see cover the bed, like buildings in a miniature city. He doesn’t know what’s happening, but he senses it isn’t good.

His and many other stacks are thrown into a duffle bag and tossed into the trunk of a car. They are driven to another location and sit in the quiet dark for a long time. Suddenly, he hears gunshots. The trunk opens and someone grabs the bag, running some distance before being hit by one of the bullets. George feels the warm spattering of blood. Then, the night air as his stack is grabbed by another person who escapes on a motorcycle.

A few minutes later, George is pulled out of his stack, rolled into a tube, and dragged across a plate of white powder. His head spins. His pupils constrict. Every detail happens in slow motion and fast-forward simultaneously. When he regains his focus it happens again and again, his tubular body passing from one person to the next. Finally, he falls to the ground. He hears gunshots. More splattering of blood. Then, he is struck, his head ripped into two pieces.

Poor George isn’t conscious for the rest of his existence. He is taped up, wiped off, and even accidentally thrown into a washing machine. And although he’s done his part as legal tender, after six years of traveling through the cold, cruel world, he is sent back to the Federal Reserve. There, he is unceremoniously shredded along with his brothers, Abraham, Alex, and Andrew, who have a similar life span. Ulysses usually meets his maker after 12 years or so, but Benji can last over 22 years. After that, they are recycled into cement, potting soil, compost, or home insulation. In other plants in Seattle, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia they are burned to generate electricity.

Although this story may seem dramatic, it’s not far from the truth. A 2002 report showed that 94% of dollar bills carry pathogens, including fecal matter. One study showed that paper money “harbors DNA from all four primary branches of the tree of life” as well as living bacteria. Paper money can also be a vector of transmissible disease. 79% to 92% have traces of cocaine and can also carry other drugs, such as morphine, methamphetamine, amphetamine, and heroin. One and five-dollar bills can be exchanged 110 times a year, picking up DNA and food particles from the fingers that touch them.

Before you switch entirely to credit cards (which are dirtier than urinals), no disease outbreaks have come from paper money. But physicists from research institutions are analyzing the dollar’s travel history to track how we spread disease using data from a website, called WheresGeorge.com. Using this date, they were even able to predict the spread of swine flu in 2009.

Now that you know how filthy paper currency is, your first impulse may be to throw it into the washing machine. But the federal government discourages money laundering of any kind, whether it’s with shell companies, mules, or Tide detergent. It is also illegal to tear, burn, or otherwise destroy money.

So how should you deal with all the filth? Wear gloves when you handle it. Or, better, yet, listen to the advice given by the World Health Organization: wash your hands with soap and water after touching it. And, no matter what, don’t touch your face.

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