What Does Disease Smell Like?

What Does Disease Smell Like?

April 9, 2015

Getting sick stinks. Literally. What I mean is that different diseases give off different odors, and sometimes doctors can diagnose you based on how you smell.

I’m Anna Rothschild, and this is Gross Science.

So, it turns out that doctors have known since the time of Hippocrates that different diseases smell different ways.

For example, typhoid, which causes fever, abdominal pain, delirium, and can kill you, smells like freshly baked brown bread. Other infections smell totally different. The skin of people with the virus yellow fever is said to smell like a butcher shop. And if you have a burn wound infected with the bacteria pseudomonas, it might smell like grape juice.

But infections from bacteria and viruses aren’t the only diseases that can make you emit a certain aroma. Genetic conditions—one’s you’re born with—can do the same thing.

For example, maple syrup urine disease, which can be fatal if untreated, makes you smell like maple syrup. And then there’s a condition called trimethylaminurea, which has absolutely no symptoms except that it makes you smell like rotten fish.

And those are just diseases that humans can smell. Dogs can actually sniff out certain types of cancer. And scientists have now created electronic noses. These are smelling machines that can detect very faint traces of compounds that the human nose would never be able to pick up. In fact, researchers are looking into using dogs or e-noses to detect diseases before they become dangerous.

So while sniffing out the source of an illness has never really gone away, there’s a whole new frontier of stench science out there. Just take a whiff.

Ew.

PRODUCTION CREDITS:

Host, Writer, Animator, Editor

Anna Rothschild

DP, Sound, Intern Extraordinaire

Kristen Clark

Music: Chauncy

©Podington Bear

MEDIA CREDITS

Hippocrates

Wikimedia Commons/Peter Paul Rubens

…bread snorting!

Flickr/James Vaughan

Abbys snowsuit

Flickr/Dave Jacquin

Pancakes

Flickr/Lemsipmatt

Edwardian Butchers shop

Flickr/Paul Townsend

Bdna cropped

Wikimedia Commons/Jahobr

Fish Head

Wikimedia Commons/mdid

Cyranose 320 Labelled

Wikimedia Commons/Cyrano Sciences Inc.

SFX

Cockroaches

Freesound/StateAardvark
(used with permission from author)

Squeak Pack/squeak_10

Freesound/Corsica_S

Vocal/Huh_male

Freesound/Adam_N

Sniff

Freesown/jrssandoval

Wink

Freesound/bennychico11

Sipping a juice box

Freesound/trundlefly

Produced by WGBH for PBS Digital Studios

IMAGE

(main image: Anna smelling armpit)

© WGBH Educational Foundation