Apr 19, 2020 04:58 AM
https://calgaryherald.com/news/canada/he...34f2f2cbf/
EXCERPT: Dana Small, a Victoria, B.C. native now at Yale, with a dual professorship in psychology and psychiatry, was engaged in ground-breaking research on the “gut,” and how the modern food environment plays tricks on our system before the pandemic hit. [...] “Identifying asymptomatic carriers is absolutely critical in stopping the progression of the pandemic, I believe,” Small says. “So if there is odour loss with some — even if it’s only a small percentage of people — identifying them as carriers would be significant.”
[...] Hence, says Small, the birth of the peanut butter sniff test. Peanut butter, so good on toast, and always a friend to jam, is a North American staple that stimulates the olfactory sense exclusively, unlike, say, ground coffee — a treat to inhale, no doubt — but a fragrance that fires both our sense of smell and the trigeminal nerve governing sensations like “pain and tickle,” which influence how one registers an odour.
As a control on the peanut butter, sniff-test participants are asked to breathe in a snout full of vinegar, another household staple, like coffee, that fires the trigeminal nerve. The big idea? If a subject is registering the vinegar, but the scent of the peanut butter is fading away, they can be confident their sense of smell is decreasing.
“If we find there is a trajectory of diminishing smell over days, we would be able to identify asymptomatic carriers, even before they were conscious of losing their smell,” says Small. “And in those, let’s say, five days, there could otherwise be lots of transmissions.” (MORE - details)
EXCERPT: Dana Small, a Victoria, B.C. native now at Yale, with a dual professorship in psychology and psychiatry, was engaged in ground-breaking research on the “gut,” and how the modern food environment plays tricks on our system before the pandemic hit. [...] “Identifying asymptomatic carriers is absolutely critical in stopping the progression of the pandemic, I believe,” Small says. “So if there is odour loss with some — even if it’s only a small percentage of people — identifying them as carriers would be significant.”
[...] Hence, says Small, the birth of the peanut butter sniff test. Peanut butter, so good on toast, and always a friend to jam, is a North American staple that stimulates the olfactory sense exclusively, unlike, say, ground coffee — a treat to inhale, no doubt — but a fragrance that fires both our sense of smell and the trigeminal nerve governing sensations like “pain and tickle,” which influence how one registers an odour.
As a control on the peanut butter, sniff-test participants are asked to breathe in a snout full of vinegar, another household staple, like coffee, that fires the trigeminal nerve. The big idea? If a subject is registering the vinegar, but the scent of the peanut butter is fading away, they can be confident their sense of smell is decreasing.
“If we find there is a trajectory of diminishing smell over days, we would be able to identify asymptomatic carriers, even before they were conscious of losing their smell,” says Small. “And in those, let’s say, five days, there could otherwise be lots of transmissions.” (MORE - details)