Stinky Feet to Fight Malaria

Got stinky feet?  Aside from lowering your chances of finding and keeping a mate, you probably get bitten by mosquitoes a lot.  Okay, I'm joking about the mating thing, but the mosquitoes is true--so says a recent study out of Africa that showed mosquitoes are attracted to the musky odor of human feet.  The results are so promising that the Gates Foundation will fund a further project out of Tanzania to determine how traps can be produced affordably, and how they can be used to fight malaria.

Researchers from Tanzania's Ifakara Health Institute replicated the smell of stinky socks, following the observation that mosquitoes were attracted to smelly feet (made by a Dutch scientist in another study).  Using a careful blend of eight chemicals (one a poison to kill the suckers), the odor proved to attract four times more mosquitoes than a human volunteer, and the poison killed 95% of them (not the volunteer).  Booyah!

Although the global infection rate of malaria is going down, there are still more than 220 million new cases each year. The U.N. estimates almost 800,000 of those people die. Most of them are children in Africa.

The research team initially received a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for $100,000 two years ago. The project has now been awarded an additional $775,000.

Not bad, and you thought stinky feet weren't good for anything. Well, it appears that even foot-brie can play a role in planetary betterment.  Just goes to show you how one man's curse can be another man's pesticide.

Doggie Detectives Sniff Out Cancer

Cancer detecting canines are here.  Dogs trained to sniff out prostate, breast and lung cancer did very well in two recent studies.  One presented earlier this month at a meeting of the American Urological Association found that a particular breed, Belgian Malinois shepherd dogs, can be trained to detect prostate cancer, and they do it through their incredible sense of smell.  Another study in 2006 showed trained dogs sniffed out breast and lung cancer quite accurately.  Well I'll be.

The prostate cancer study was conducted at Paris's Hospital Tenon, and looked at dogs trained to distinguish between the smell of urine from men with prostate cancer and those without.  At the end of the study the dogs correctly identified 63 of 66 samples.

Dogs have a much stronger sense of smell than do humans (100,000 times stronger) and can detect subtle changes in odor that go unnoticed by man.  Dogs' olfactory sense is so good that they've been used by police for years to sniff out drugs, explosives and escaped prisoners.

It is believed that cancer cells, particularly of the prostate, may give off distinct odors; and the molecules responsible is what has scientists most interested.  Lead researcher Jean-Nicolas Cornu concluded that the dogs "are certainly recognizing the odor of a molecule that is produced by cancer cells."

Some critics think the phenomenon might be due to subconscious cues the researchers give off leading the dogs to pick up which samples were cancerous and which were not.  This was the case with a horse named Hans, in early 1900s Germany, which was claimed to be able to solve math problems, read and understand German, and perform other uncanny tricks.  With more investigation, though, it was found that Hans was indeed picking up on subconscious cues from his trainers.  This led to the term being named in research circles as the "Clever Hans effect."

The study's authors acknowledge that more investigation needs to be done, but they are optimistic.  If it turns out that they are right and dogs are picking up the distinct smells of cancer, the hounds can be used as an screening tool for cancer, much more accurate than the current blood tests used today.

Well, it's interesting to me that the sense of smell is being used to detect something humans can't on their own.  Olfaction is a primitive sense that developed along with the limbic system.  Smell evolved as a survival mechanism to warn living things of eminent danger, whether a poisonous plant or an approaching predator.  Many organisms have better smell than humans, so why not recruit one to help?  Heck, dogs do just about everything else, why not don a white coat and participate in some research?  Now, that's a good boy.

Bad Breath Busters

Afraid of bad breath--yours, not somebody else's? If so, you suffer from halitophobia. Halitophobia is the fear of halitosis, or severe bad breath. Up to 25% of people claiming to have halitosis actually don't; they are simply halitophobic.

But bad breath is a problem. 25% of all adults have chronic bad breath, while the numbers might be as high as 50% in older adults. Fortunately, scientists think they may have found a solution. A group at the State University of New York at Buffalo School of Dental Medicine have found that brushing twice a day with a toothpaste containing triclosan and scraping the tongue surface eliminated halitosis. The researchers tested people before and after using they toothpaste and tongue scraper by measuring mouth air levels of odor-causing bacteria and analyzing tongue scrapings for 20 species of bacteria known to cause bad breath. They found odor levels to decrease by 75%.

Nice. Let's all let out a big shout for the Bad Breath Busters. We all know some people who can use a little triclosan, and we all know some that we'd like to send a barrelfull. But for now we can rest assured that some very serious scientists are on the halito-patrol. And I can go have that garlic omelet in peace.