Did you know that your body odour can reveal if you are sick, even years before symptoms show? Scientists are discovering that our sweat, breath, and even skin release chemicals that can act as warning signs for diseases.
That’s exactly what Prof. Perdita Barran, a British chemist, thought when she first heard about a woman who claimed she could smell Parkinson’s disease.
Her name is Joy Milne, a retired nurse from Scotland. She first noticed her husband had developed a strange musky smell years before doctors diagnosed him with Parkinson’s, a brain condition that causes shaking and stiffness. Later, at a meeting with other patients, she realised they all had the same smell.
To test her, scientists gave her 12 T-shirts, half worn by Parkinson’s patients and half by healthy people. Joy sniffed each one and got them all right. She even flagged one person who wasn’t diagnosed yet but developed Parkinson’s the following year.
According to scientists, when you eat, drink, or even get sick, your body produces small molecules called volatile organic compounds (VOCs). These escape through sweat, breath, or urine and they can subtly change your natural body odour.
Doctors are learning that certain diseases give off specific smells:
- Diabetes: fruity, like rotten apples
- Liver disease: musty or sulphurous
- Kidney failure: breath like ammonia or fish
- Tuberculosis (TB): like stale beer or wet cardboard
Kenyan scientists have been part of this research. In 2018, a study in western Kenya discovered that children with malaria gave off a fruity, grassy smell that made them more attractive to mosquitoes. Now researchers are exploring whether that smell can be used to trap mosquitoes away from villages.
Dogs already use their super-sensitive noses to detect cancer, malaria, epilepsy, and even low blood sugar in diabetic patients. But training dogs takes time, and not every dog qualifies.
That’s why scientists are building robotic noses, machines that can “sniff” diseases faster and more accurately. Imagine walking into a clinic in Kisumu or Nairobi and, instead of painful tests, a quick skin swab or breath sample could reveal malaria, TB, or even cancer.
In Kenya, many diseases are diagnosed late when treatment is harder and more expensive. Early, non-invasive tests could be a game-changer, especially for illnesses like TB and malaria that affect millions every year.
This means that the future of medicine might not be in needles and hospital machines, but it could be in the scents our bodies release every day.