27/10/98

Nothing smells like a rose(nberg)

    Mel smells.
    He sniffs armpits, inhales stinky breath, and if you're game -- and gamy -- he'll even venture up your nose. Acrid crotch? Cheesy feet? Mel will take a snort, with pleasure.
    These days, Prof. Mel Rosenberg is a tad smelly himself. "Sorry about that. I'm doing an experiment," says the rank maven on bad breath and body odors. "I've been doing all kinds of experiments where I don't wear deodorant. I have been, to a certain extent, smelly for weeks." Mind you, he does shower: "If I didn't, people around me would fall on their backs."
    Mel, one of the world's experts on human pungency, operates clinics that attract the kind of clientele anyone else would sniff at.
    "We have bad-breath clinics at Sprinzak in Tel Aviv and in London, and a body-odor clinic at the Marom Basel Medical Center in North Tel Aviv, probably the first place in the world you can take a body-odor problem." (If you're on your way, please note: that is not the Basel Hotel. "Sometimes patients go there by accident saying 'Smell me! Smell me!' And they're told, sorry sir, this is a hotel.")
    "Yeah, I'll admit, it's a bit weird what I do. My kids have a certain ambivalence to this discipline. But it's a very humorous thing. Sometimes I'll be sitting with my staff and we'll just crack up. Y'know, a stranger comes into the room, I stick my nose into his mouth. One lady came in last week, and I went over to smell her, and she broke out laughing, and for 20 minutes we couldn't stop. Though many people are, of course, embarrassed."
    His interest in piquancy piqued at an early age, when he was a lad in Ottawa. (They must be very proud of him.) "I had an uncle who had terrible bad breath and I said, 'Uncle George, when I grow up I'm going to do research and I'm going to help your problem.'" Mel thinks about that for a moment. "Thoug if I had to do everything over again, I probably would have been a wine taster, or a perfume developer. It would be nice to work with pleasant smells."
    His interest evolved. "You don't go to university to learn this. You can't get a BA in Smell. (A BO, maybe.) It's a difficult area to study." He is, he points out, a microbiologist, not a doctor.
    "I used to like smelling babies' heads. I didn't think it was peculiar. I thought everyone likes smelling babies' heads.
“I fell into this area because in the early 1980s [I helped] invent a mouthwash, Assuta, which is now being launched in England as Dentyl PH.
    "I'd never given any thought to bad breath, including my own. I even had bad breath and didn't know it."
    "I was at the dental school in Tel Aviv in the early '80s and I said, hmm, bad breath, that's interesting. So I went to a library and saw there was hardly any research on it. I went home and said to my wife: 'I've fallen on a goldmine. Here's a research subject that's mainly bacteria, and wow, everybody's interested in it but nobody's doing anything about it.
    "I went back to the dental school and told everyone I'd decided to do research on bad breath. They thought I was off my rocker. I had to suffer a lot of ridicule from my peers, they made fun of me."
    He began to understand he was on the right track over the next decade. "I was interviewed by the Toronto Star, and they received something like 300 letters. The light went on and I realized I have to start taking this stuff seriously from a scientific point of view, and disregard the barbs of my peers. I did research in Toronto and then continued in Tel Aviv.
    "In 1983, we organized the First International Conference on Bad Breath -- can you imagine? -- in Herzliya. We had 42 people from six countries. That got people interested. Two years later, a second conference in Belgium drew 140 people from 14 countries. That was a great meeting, a real gas. We were elected the worst conference of the year to go to. Anyway, now we have an international society based in Tel Aviv with almost 100 members. We're expecting 400 participants at a third conference in Vancouver, in August."
    From bad breath he branched out. "A few years ago, I started getting interested in body odor," he says, and you can see why. "There are differences, you know. Bad breath is just basically bad breath, but every person has a unique body odor.
    "Wherever I've traveled, I've noticed that people have the same sort of bad breath. It's basically the same in all cultures, as it comes from gum disease, or off the back of the tongue, which I believe is the result of post-nasal drip. They're quite similar no matter what the culture or ethnic background."
    There are, however, nuances. People who eat lots of garlic or onions, perhaps cabbage and broccoli, will exude a corresponding whiff together with basic halitosis. To that list he adds local specialties