![\"\"](\"https:\/\/dev.vijeejournalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/agrippina-e1656189759333-295x300-1.jpg\")
<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u00a0<\/p>\nEarly in the pandemic, which began in March 2020, London-based reporter Paolo Totaro, abruptly lost her sense of smell. With that, food too turned unappetizing \u2013 her favorite dark chocolate tasted like \u201cunscented soap.\u201d Trapped in this sensory void, Totaro began her journalistic investigation into the mysteries of smell, and the result is the engaging, timely, and hopeful book, \u201cOn the Scent,\u201d which she has co-authored with her husband Robert Wainwright.<\/h3>\n
Worldwide, the COVID 19 virus affected millions of patients\u2019 ability to smell \u2013 and the symptom persisted in some, months after the infection passed. The pandemic put a spotlight on this spectrum of olfactory impairment. Anosmia is the clinical term for an inability to perceive smell. Parosmia turns pleasant smells like coffee and cologne into stenches for some (the \u201cfortunate\u201d ones perceive foul smells as pleasant.) In phantosmia, people hallucinate smells.<\/h3>\n
Totaro\u2019s personal experience and sensitive profiles of fellow-anosmics and parosmics make it clear that a sense of smell is integral to peoples\u2019 emotional well-being \u2014 depression strikes a good third of the people who have lost their ability to smell. The neuroscientist Oliver Sacks has written of \u201ca woman transfixed by grief when she couldn\u2019t recognise the smell of her own baby; a man\u2019s faltering explanation of the deadening effect of anosmia on lovemaking; and a passionate home cook who could not enjoy the tantalizing smell of onions frying \u2013 or of her pots burning on the stove.\u201d<\/h3>\n
Smells warn us of spoiled food or gas leaks, and other threats in our surroundings. Even when olfactory loss is temporary, it cannot be dismissed as trivial.<\/h3>\n
Smell is the most understudied of our five senses. The author introduces us to the work of pioneering olfactory researchers such as Linda Buck who identified the family of genes that allows humans to detect and distinguish smells. Buck\u2019s fundamental research, for which she won the Nobel Prize for physiology in 2004, has laid the groundwork to understand certain diseases characterized by a loss of smell.<\/h3>\n
Gathering evidence shows that conditions like Alzheimer\u2019s and Parkinson\u2019s are associated with an early loss of smell and the symptom is linked with schizophrenia and dystonia. So, in the future, the smell test may be part of routine health checkups, particularly for older people, the author writes.<\/h3>\n
Researchers have figured out some of the biological mechanisms that lead to covid-related smell loss. The virus does not infect odor-detecting nerve cells, but attacks cells that play a supporting role in the olfactory system \u2013 so regeneration is a possibility.<\/h3>\n
But no doctor can tell you how long this disruption of smell will last or even if you will recover. Though there is no cure for anosmia, a technique known as smell training \u2013 regular, mindful sniffing of basic aromas such as those of\u00a0rose<\/strong>,\u00a0<\/strong>clove<\/strong>,\u00a0<\/strong>eucalyptus,<\/strong>\u00a0and\u00a0<\/strong>lemon<\/strong>\u00a0\u2013<\/strong>\u00a0has been demonstrated to help some patients with olfactory loss. Patience is key, writes Tatoro.<\/h3>\n
On a recent trip to Puglia, that authors saw a religious procession on the streets of a small Italian town, complete with a parishioner carrying an old incense burner. Tatoro writes that the scent of frankincense and myrrh brought back childhood memories of attending Mass with her grandmother. And she wept in gratitude, for her newly functional nose.<\/h3>\n