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Imagine taking the first sip of your morning coffee, only to be hit by an overwhelming, gut-churning stench. This altered sense of smell is a reality for many living with a post-COVID smell dysfunction called parosmia—a disorder that twists even comforting smells into repulsive ones. A recent study offers crucial insights into some key characteristics and treatment options for post-COVID parosmia. The study identifies stellate ganglion block (SGB)—a procedure involving injecting a local anesthetic into the stellate ganglion, a collection of nerves in the neck—as a possible effective treatment to help alleviate the distorted sense of smell in patients. "The...

Severe head traumas in humans can lead to various stages of so-called disorders of consciousness (DoC). These are states in which consciousness is either partly or entirely absent, such as a coma; unresponsive wakefulness syndrome, also known as a vegetative state; and minimally conscious state. Researchers recently carried out a study investigating the responses of patients in a coma or vegetative state to smells, to understand whether they could be used to evaluate consciousness. As part of their study, the researchers evaluated the responses of 28 patients at different stages of DoC to olfactory stimuli. Out of these patients, 13...

National Lutefisk Day! YA YA VE SKAL HA LUTEFISK N LEFSA

On the left is a baby happily responding to the sweet taste of carrot and on the right is a baby grimacing at the bitter taste of kaleFETAP (Fetal Taste Preferences) Study, Fetal and Neonatal Research Lab, Durham University An extraordinary new study has recorded the first evidence of babies in the womb reacting to flavors of foods eaten by their mothers. The stunning images show fetuses crumpling up their faces in disgust minutes after a mother consumes bitter kale or smiling with glee in the presence of sweet carrot flavors. Anecdotally, most mothers will tell you their babies were...

I’m getting on the other side of covid. I would compare it to a moderate flu. Lots of coughing, congestion, some body aches and 1 day of fever, etc. Not that big of a deal. However, my smell is 100% gone. Literally can’t smell gas when I put my nose to a gas can funnel. Taste is maybe 10% there. Can anyone share how long it took for your sense of smell to come back?

Honolulu (HawaiiNewsNow) -- A Hawaii lab has detected a petroleum product in a water sample collected from the Pearl Harbor-Hickam system -- a worrisome finding that comes as the investigation into the source of the fuel-like odor and oily sheen from the water continues. It’s the first confirmation of what military households and other impacted residents have been reporting for days: That their water smells like fuel and has made them sick. But the results also raise more questions, including how much petroleum is present and what kind it is. Environmental Health Deputy Director Kathleen Ho stressed the results are...

Loss of smell is one of the main symptoms of COVID-19, alongside a loss of taste, persistent cough, and high temperature.A 12-week trial will look at whether nasal drops can help those who lost their sense of smell after having COVID-19. The "Apollo trial" will treat people who have experienced a loss of smell or altered sense of smell because of coronavirus using vitamin A nasal drops. The University of East Anglia (UEA) said research from Germany has shown the potential benefit of the vitamin, and its team "will explore how this treatment works to help repair tissues in the...

A subset of COVID survivors are suffering from an unexpected side effect known as parosmia, a condition that causes their sense of smell to go haywire. Coffee smells like sewage and chicken smells like rotting garbage. Yara set out to learn how COVID is doing this to people, and what life is like when you smell and taste all the wrong things with no end in sight

Thursday on FNC’s “The Ingraham Angle,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) weighed in on Biden chief medical advisor Anthony Fauci’s approach to determining the origins of COVID-19 and the reluctance to blame the Chinese government for the introduction of the virus. The South Carolina Republican lawmaker suggested the efforts to frame the so-called lab-leak theory as a conspiracy theory were to deflect attention from a “relationship” some within the U.S. government had with the Wuhan lab.

A DCN review of scientific literature and anecdotal advice from scholars of taste and smell shows dozens of examples of coffee being used as the barometer for a kind of sniff-test for COVID-19, in part for its distinct smell and also for its availability in homes throughout the world.The CDC now lists the loss of smell, known as anosmia, as one of the most common symptoms of COVID-19, with most recent studies indicating that about 50% to as much as 80% of people testing positive for the virus have suffered from anosmia.

Doctors and researchers still have much to learn about the exact symptoms caused by COVID-19, but a group of ear, nose and throat doctors now suspect two such symptoms may be an altered sense of taste, called dysgeusia, and a loss of smell, known as anosmia. In a statement released earlier this week, the American Academy of Otolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery reported: "Anecdotal evidence is rapidly accumulating from sites around the world that anosmia and dysgeusia are significant symptoms associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Anosmia, in particular, has been seen in patients ultimately testing positive for the coronavirus with...

Every day I take my dog out for a walk. I actually do it twice a day. It is first thing in the morning and at the end of the day after the evening meal. We live on the beach, and there is a nice long park right in front of the house (it is a boardwalk) with an absolutely magnificent view of the ocean and the skyscrapers of Macao in the distance. While we are out there enjoying the morning air and watching the joggers on the beach, our dog is nose-to-the-ground and smelling everything like a canine vacuum...

I had to shorten the title so it's misleading Dentists can SMELL your fear: Study warns their ability to detect patients' anxiety may cause them to make more mistakesStudy of dental students found that dentists can smell when a patient is anxious It found this can make them more likely to make mistakes and perform poorly Students donated two shirts each, one worn during stress and one during calm Performed procedures on mannequins wearing the shirts, and they did significantly worse on the dummies wearing the 'stressed' clothingFear of the dentist is a real thing - but it may cause...

If you’ve ever noticed a strange, not-entirely-pleasant scent coming from your urine after you eat asparagus, you’re definitely not alone. Distinguished thinkers as varied as Scottish mathematician and physician John Arbuthnot (who wrote in a 1731 book that “asparagus…affects the urine with a foetid smell”) and Marcel Proust (who wrote how the vegetable “transforms my chamber-pot into a flask of perfume”) have commented on the phenomenon. Even Benjamin Franklin took note, stating in a 1781 letter to the Royal Academy of Brussels that “A few Stems of Asparagus eaten, shall give our Urine a disagreable Odour” (he was trying to...

If you’ve ever said, all I have to do is smell food and I gain weight — a new study says you may be right. The delicious aroma of baked goods or the alluring smells of pizza can not only make you feel hungry, but enjoying the scent of high-calorie, high-carb foods may also expand your waistline. A new study out of the University of California, Berkeley, and published in Cell Metabolism found that one's sense of smell is linked to weight gain. But how can that be? The study says it is possibly related to the way your body...

Just about four years ago we published a post on 15 Manly Smells. The article received a ton of comments from folks who wanted to add their own favorite manly smells to the list, and the other day I found myself lost in enjoyment reading over them all again. So many of the additions were so great and evocative and so worthy of mention, and as the first post was one of my all-time favorites, I couldn’t resist compiling another edition. Enjoy and add your still unmentioned favorites to the comments!Black Coffee “My favorite scent, not just manly scent,...

Police were kept from the crime scene for roughly three hours while a mysterious smell was investigated by a hazmat teamA man covered in blood directed police to the 11th floor of the Miami Beach Resort late Saturday night, saying he had just witnessed the shooting of a friend. But after responding to a 911 call from the hotel on Collins Avenue around 10 p.m., authorities were interrupted on their way to the crime scene by an alarming and very strong odor. A hazmat team was dispatched, and an estimated 1,000 guests, many part of a wedding party underway on...

Our sense of smell plays an important role in how we interpret the world around us. And for people who love cats, there are few scents as welcome as the smell of the soft fur on a kitten's head. That delectable scent is now available in a bottle. Perfume company Demeter Fragrance Library (DFL) recently announced the release of a new fragrance dubbed "Kitten Fur." The perfume captures "the olfactory essence of the warmth and comfort of that "purr"-fect spot, just behind a kitten's neck," according to a product description on the company's website. Kitten Fur joins a range of...

In the late 1980s in the UK, a border collie-Doberman mix began paying extreme attention to a mole on his owner’s left thigh. The 44-year-old woman noticed that the dog would sniff there for minutes on end, trying to bite it off whenever she wore shorts. The dog’s fixation wasn’t random. What the dog was smelling wasn’t just the mole, but the melanoma causing it — and its subsequent removal might just have saved the woman’s life. In this new book, author Horowitz shows how canines, whose sense of smell is anywhere between 10,000 and 100,000 times more acute than...

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (Reuters) - Rats have been evicted from the Arkansas governor's mansion but the lingering effects of a rodent infestation, including noxious odors, require its study to be demolished and rebuilt, officials said this week. The rodents, in a non-partisan manner, have been a problem for former Governor Mike Beebe, a Democrat who served from 2007 to 2015, and for current Governor Asa Hutchinson, a Republican who has served since then. "You can walk in (the study) today and still smell the rat stench. It looks fine, but it's hideous smelling," current first lady Susan Hutchinson told a...