According to researchers, men who have ‘putrid’ smelling B.O. are more likely to have gonorrhoea compared to their sweeter smelling counterparts.
Yes that’s right, you can apparently tell if someone has gonorrhoea by how bad they smell. That’s because a small study found that gonorrhoea-infected men smelled “putrid” to a bunch of young ladies.
“Our research revealed that infection disease reduces odour attractiveness in humans,” wrote Mikhail Moshkin, a professor at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk, Russia, and the lead author of the research published in the most recent issue of the Journal of Sexual Medicine.
According to Moshkin and his colleagues it’s not so much a banging waft of B.O. that will put the ladies off but a more subtle chemical warning.
The study saw 34 Russian men aged 17 to 25 who worked up a sweat in the name of science. The 34 men included 13 with gonorrhoea, 16 who were completely clean and five who had been treated for the disease. Also included in the study was 18 female volunteers aged 17 to 20.
The researchers gathered the sweat off the lads and asked the women to sniff it, telling them to rank its smell on a “pleasantness score”.
When the girls were asked to characterise the scent, they said that nearly 50 per cent of the infected men’s sweat smelled “putrid.”
Although, they also said that 30 per cent of sweat from the healthy men and less than 40 per cent of sweat from the treated men smelled putrid too. It just so happened that it was higher for the gonorrhoea group.
“We can conclude that unpleasant body odour of infected persons can reduce the probability of a dangerous partnership,” the scientists say.
So if you get the stink eye off the woman sitting beside you, it may be because she sniffed you out. Then again, it was an extremely small sample with a small variant in the results. Still, nice to know.
