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New generation of deodorants 'on the way'
Experts believe they have found a better way to tackle body odour (BO). The key, they say, is understanding how skin bacteria create the smell from virtually odourless armpit sweat.
Two teams, at the Universities of York and Oxford, say they have now deciphered the first step in this molecular process. It could pave the way for a new generation of deodorants designed to block this unpleasant chain of events, the journal eLife [open, DOI: 10.7554/eLife.34995] [DX] reports.
[...] Co-author Dr Gavin Thomas, from the Department of Biology at the University of York, said: "Modern deodorants act a bit like a nuclear bomb in our underarms, inhibiting or killing many of the bacteria present in order to prevent BO. Only a small number of the bacteria in our armpits are actually responsible for bad smells."
These Staphylococus hominis bacteria use a "transport" protein to recognise and swallow up the odourless compounds secreted in sweat that they convert into BO. And Dr Thomas and colleagues say this could be used as a blueprint to develop a more guided weapon against BO - a new type of spray or roll-on deodorant containing a substance that would stop the transport protein from functioning.
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(Score: 4, Insightful) by idiot_king on Thursday July 05 2018, @03:10AM (4 children)
We don't know the long-term tail risk effects of killing off bacteria that grows on the human body. It reminds me of damming up the Nile, only to realize that because the Nile naturally fertilized the floodplain, so fertilizer factories that ran on the electricity of the dam were built to fertilize the fields that were now deprived of nutrients from the river which was dammed up for....presumably providing power to some factories.
If we get rid of the bacteria, we only may find out that they were necessary for something or other - perhaps even mate attraction to a degree, as is well known that humans are attracted to each others' smells when their biological compatibility for mating is good. Then we might end up needing to spray ourselves with haphazard bacteria strains to help make up for the ones we lack - but we don't know if different strains grow on different people to give them different smells and all that or to fight off different disease even. So this could explode in danger. And yes, for the record I shower and use deodorant but not antiperspirant - another bad thing for human skin.
Long and short of it: Crapitalism to the anti-rescue once again...
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 05 2018, @03:16AM
You need to stop showering immediately, you fucking moron. Smell the way you act.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 05 2018, @08:15AM (1 child)
I am more concerned with possibility that these specialized bacteria are our symbiots, rather than our parasites - that they fill sensitive and hard to defend areas of our skin and outcompete pathogenic microbes which may otherwise catch on and endanger our health, our mobility (poorly ventilated pits of major limb joints) and life (if attackers are antibiotic resistant).
That possible role of these bacteria, if true, would explain the selection for smelliness - signaling your fitness, and role of body odor in mating partner selection.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday July 07 2018, @12:26AM
I think you might be onto something there.
I'm in the second year of an experiment. I stopped using soap when washing (except hands). I've gotten sick so much less. I used to have terrible allergies in the spring; now I don't get them at all. I used to have a lot of dandruff; now I don't have that problem. I used to have a moderate problem with BO; now I don't. People compliment me on my skin, which has never happened before.
Instead of soap I scrub with a sandstone I found. It seems to do the trick.
My working theory is that all the anti-bacterial soaps and chemicals in commercial products cause a general state of inflammation in our bodies that elicits an immune response and causes various other problems like BO. Our skin is an ecosystem and we still know little about the role its inhabitants play in our health.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 05 2018, @02:16PM
Better not brush your teeth with toothpaste either.
Who knows what valuable bacteria you are losing when you clean your mouth.
Look, even FLIES will clean themselves (as best they can, anyway). MOST animals will. BO bacteria are overwhelmingly likely just freeloading off you. And anyway, this research isn't about sterilizing your pits. It's a move to allow bacteria to live there but mess with just the BO bacterial species.