London: Feeling indecisive whether to marry a man with body odour? You may benefit from a Russian scientist, who can tell from man's body smell if he has a sexually-transmitted disease (STD).
According to a new study, sniffing a potential partner's scent could tell if Mr Right has a sexually-transmitted disease, the Daily Mail reported, citing MSNBC.
The research found how men, infected by a common sexually transmitted infection gonorrhea, smelt 'putrid' to women.
"Our research revealed that infection disease reduces odour attractiveness in humans," wrote Mikhail Moshkin, a professor at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Russia, and the lead author of research published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine.
The off-putting scent may be subtle, more of a chemical warning than a stench of body odour, but it does have some effect, according to experiment conducted by Moshkin and his colleagues.
The researchers had already observed that certain animals, such as mice and rats, were not as attracted to the scents of those that were infected with disease.
They investigated if humans would also be turned off by the scent of an infected person, particularly one with an STD. For the study, the researchers took samples of armpit sweat and spit from 34 Russian men aged between 17 and 25. The group included 13 young men with gonorrhea, a common sexually transmitted infection, 16 who were healthy and five who had had the disease but were successfully treated.
Then 18 female students aged 17 to 20 were asked to sniff the samples. They obtained sweat samples by dressing the men in tight-fitting T-shirts with cotton pads sewn into the armpits.
The women ranked the infected men less than half as high as healthy or recovered guys on a 'pleasantness score' that assessed scent. On being asked to describe the scent, the women said that nearly 50 percent of the infected men's sweat smelt 'putrid'.
The researchers said the study indicates that humans, like other animals, might use scent to sniff out appropriate mates.
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