Mexico City pollution eroding residents' sense of smell
Reuters says that a study has found that Mexico City's notorious pollution is damaging people's sense of smell.
Robyn Hudson, a researcher at Mexico's National Autonomous University in Mexico City and her team found that residents of the capital were like coffee and orange juice than those in a nearby town with low air pollution. Reuters reports:
Their noses are so badly damaged from a life inhaling toxic particles that they also find it harder to detect the scent of rotten food, said researcher Robyn Hudson, who ran the study.
"We added a substance [to powdered milk] that is a common contaminant of food, something that smells disgusting, basically 鈥� like a sour, rotting cabbage," said Hudson.
"We were able to see at what point ... they would start to reject the contaminated sample, say, 'Ew, yuck! No! Take it away, please,' " said Hudson....
Reuters didn't say if Ms. Hudson had published a paper on her smell study, but a Google search spat out an earlier study in the journal Chemical Senses, authored by Hudson and titled "" (that links to the abstract; you can read ). In that study, published in 2005, researchers exposed subjects to squeeze-bottles filled with common beverages like mango Tang and "horchata" (OK, common in Mexico).
The researchers found that the subjects from Mexico City had higher thresholds for detecting a smell, a poorer ability to describe smells, and a poorer ability to discriminate between smells than subjects from Tlaxcala, a state to the east of Mexico City that is geographically similar but has less pollution.
Mexico City is known for some of the . The city of 25 million sits in a valley atop a high plateau, an ideal spot for smog to settle. Government figures suggest that the poor air quality may account for tens of thousands of premature deaths.
Reuters notes that a 2007 study in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine found that school children in Mexico City had .
Officials have taken steps to address the problem. In 1989, the city introduced "Hoy No Circula," a program in which cars with license plates ending in certain numbers would be prohibited from driving on a given day of the week.
[Via , which, true to form, headlined the story, "Nothing to Sniff At."]
