16/12/99

Down at the ol'factory

(Part II)

    The Nosenberg rose -- I mean, Rosenberg nose -- has been places you could only dare imagine.
    Last time Not Page One hit the stands, we told you all about our very own world expert on bad breath and body odor. Mel Rosenberg's clinics in Tel Aviv and London attract the raciest members of the human race for hands-on diag-noses and, you'll be happy to hear, life-saving remedies. 
    That is not an exaggeration.
    "It can be a psychosis. People have been known to commit suicide because of bad breath -- and these are people who don't even have the problem -- they think they do, and they avoid people because of it.  It's weird: people who have the problem don't know it, some who don't, are convinced they do.
    "We had a lady who thought she had bad breath, and we convinced her she didn't. Turns out her father had bad breath, so she subconsciously assumed she did too. So she brought her 84-year-old father over from New York, and we cured him."
    Mel has devoted his life to the perils of personal pungency. He works with psychologists and psychiatrists. He tools around in the lab, inventing consumer goods and gadgets. He sticks his nose right up into strangers' most intimate regions, sniffing out their embarrassments. And he doesn't stop there: he's a human guinea pig. "I experiment on myself. I always smell myself. All the time."
    He's not a nut, he's a professor. There's a difference: it's not scientific satisfaction that stimulates somebody with a saddle fetish.
    "On the one hand, I love to laugh about it. It's a great subject at parties. People hear what I do and they back away. Hey, I'd also be nervous.
    "But there is, of course, a serious side to it," says the Tel Aviv University microbiologist, a native of Ottawa. "The sense of smell is largely ignored by science -- it's hard to measure, hard to describe.
    "There's not even a name for the expertise -- for that matter, there are no names for smells. There are hundreds of names for colors and shades of colors but in smell, it's always a metaphor. Something smells like jasmine or a rose. As far as I know, no language or culture has names."
    Interesting, no?
    "Smells are associated with our primitive brain: they're strongly connected to memory. When I was on sabbatical in Toronto, I smelled the Canadian autumn, which I hadn't smelled in 25 years. It threw me back to the age of three or four, when I went to Ottawa Rough Rider [football] games with my father. We all have these experiences of smelling things and being thrown back into distant memory. It's almost overpowering.
    "Smell is contextual. If you smell a rose, you'd say it's wonderful. If I gave you a steak that smelled like a rose, you'd say 'gawd!' It's the same with farts and feces. If it's your own,  well, a lot of people like the smell. But others, in context, it's vile."
    Mel can recommend a good book on flatulence, if you want to pursue this.
    "There was a time, thousands of years ago, before Kupat Holim, when we had to rely on our noses -- to see if water was potable, if food was edible, whether people we associated with were diseased or not. Bacterial odors are, for this reason, vile."
    And what would the good perfessor categorize as the most repulsive smell?
    "Barf. Barf has to be one of the worst smells in the world."
    His most odiferous consultees have been, surprisingly, those with nose woes. "We had an unfortunate patient with an infected nasal tumor that smelled terrible. There was an interesting case of a retarded teenager who stuffed Kleenex up his nose, and it putrefied up there for months. He had a smell you could detect from 10 meters. He was misdiagnosed by several physicians: no one thought to look up his nose.
    "The medical professions aren't skilled in smell, though 100 or 200 years ago a physician could make a lot of diagnostic decisions based on smell. Gynecologists still can. In China, it's customary to smell patients.
    "If a child comes home and all of a sudden he has a terrible smell, even if the odor appears to be coming from the whole body, the first place to look is up the kid's nose, because they stick everything in there. For kids, nostrils are playthings; the criterion is what fits: peas, beans, tissue, little toys, you name it.
    "The kids take the exudate and rub it over their bodies, so the whole body stinks, and the doctor doesn't know where to look. The key is, with this retarded kid, his back didn't smell, because he couldn't touch it.
    "We had a case of a 28-year-old woman who had a peculiar smell up her nose. A calcified foreign body was found there, Kaplan Hospital had to operate on her and remove it with a chisel. They found a little plastic bead that she'd put there when she was three. She knew she had a bad smell coming from her nose, but I was the first person to take her seriously."
    In most cases, Mel says, bad breath and body odor can be treated. He doesn't necessarily have to resort to his smell-and-tell procedure, either. "Now there's a web site on bad breath where we give answers and reveal research. We've had about 9,000 'hits' so far -- I get email from all over the world, every day, and I try to help as best as I can without actually smelling them."
    (His email address: melros@post.tau.ac.il ; the web site: www.tau.ac.il/~melros/Welcome.html ).
    Beauty may be in the eyes of the beholder, but true attraction is in the nostrils.
    "I believe the armpit is a sexual organ, and one of its goals is to allow chemical communication between men and women. When you see a woman, how do you know if she's genetically complementary to you? You can look her over, but you're not going to get a real chemical picture."
    He insists that natural armpit smell attracts, rather than repels. "This is, again, contextual: we've been taught to be repeled by body odor.  In some cultures it was customary for young maidens to put a handkerchief in their armpits, or a slice of apple, and present it to a prospective beau.
    "I'm convinced that one of the reasons I married my wife is because of her smell. I love my wife's armpit odor. (Don't get excited -- he's a scientist, remember.) We met folk dancing, and I've noticed that lots of couples who meet folk dancing get married.
    "You can't convince me that God created this smelly armpit for no reason."
    Which brings us to the crotch. "The crotch also has these glands, each attached to a hair -- the rest of the body doesn't. Why do we have hairs in the crotch and armpit? I believe to spread the word: they're like odor antennae. Remember, we only develop body odor -- and hair in our armpits and crotch -- at puberty."
    Breath, on the other hand, is almost universally negative, he says. "Of the thousands of people I've seen, I've only come across one couple where the husband actually likes his wife's natural breath. He asks her sometimes to talk so he can smell her breath. I interviewed them, I couldn't believe it. Unfortunately, she wouldn't let me smell her."
    And where does he stand on feet? "They have the regular sweat glands, but the reason they smell so cheesy is because we put them in shoes. If you were to put your hands in gloves for 14 hours a day for years, they'd smell like feet." (Go on, try it.)
    When Mel's not up an underarm, you may very well find him in the lab, a sort of olfactory factory. He has developed new ways to diagnose and treat body odors, and a technique for sampling armpits. He helped invent a "unique" mouthwash, Assuta. "It's the only mouthwash in the world you can actually see working in the sink, because when you spit it out you can see all the guck attached to the oil droplets."
    He has started up a company, InnoScent, that puts out such products as  a shoe spray he invented. His major project lately is to invent a safe deodorant.
    "In Israel, most deodorants are antiperspirants -- which contain aluminium salts. Aluminium is considered by many people to be harmful: it's been implicated in Alzheimer's and other diseases, and may cause cancer, though it's not yet proven. We're in the development stage of an alternative deodorant."
    Mel has put a lot of thought into that most vexing of human challenges: how to tell someone he smells bad.
    "The answer is, it's almost impossible. If it's someone in your family, you owe it to them, because no one else will tell them.
    "Otherwise, if you're really brave you can maybe say something, and some people will appreciate it in the long run. Or you can drop hints, like leaving them a bottle of mouthwash, or deodorant.
    "Or you can ask me, and I'll tell 'em."