Woman who has spent her life smelling like a rotten fish is diagnosed with genetic condition
The Medical Journal of Australia reports that a woman who has complained of smelling like a rotting fish for most of her life has been diagnosed with a genetic condition that causes her to emit a disagreeable odor.
The woman has been diagnosed with an incurable genetic condition called trimethylaminuria, or fish malodour syndrome, which affects the smell of sweat, breath and urine."The characteristic body odour resembling rotting fish can be intermittent, variable and influenced by diet, hormones and medications," her doctors said in the Medical Journal of Australia.
Here's a video about another woman who has this unfortunate condition. "It's not just body odor, it can fill an entire room. And recently it filled an auditorium. It's a very heavy, dark, deep, intense smell."
Unfortunately, there's no cure.
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This must be a common condition for people in airports. I've been in crowded lines and I'm positive a few people around me were suffering from this exact condition.
Aw, that stinks.
/hadtodoit
I was going to mention an episode of The Little Rascals in which Alfalfa uses a big fish as a false leg and attracts the attention of dozens of alley cats, but that would be tasteless.
That kid in Freaks and Geeks had it, remember? Gordon.
strange..
when i was a kid, i used to call my friend's aunt "dead fish woman".. she hated it..
if this Australian woman smells like my friend's aunt i feel sorry for her..
my friend's aunt smelled like a very old fish carcass. like what you might find in a dried up creek bed. not a fishy smell at all, but a real stick of dried out dead fish.
you get the same smell from dried shrimp powder used in Thai cooking.
Wow. I wonder if it's something folks living with this condition suffer directly, e.g.: they can't stomach their own scent, or indirectly, e.g.: they don't notice it per se, but everyone around them does. I guess it goes to show, there's usually someone out there who's worse-off than you; be grateful for what you have?
This reminds me of the time when one (just one) of my testicles was hurting. After several trips to specialists and ultrasounds etc, I was finally diagnosed -- I had [some medical term]. What's that I asked? "It means you have unexplained pain in your testicle."
Nice sleuthing, everyone!!!!!
So they figured out why this girl stinks like fish - because she smells like fish :-)
Hmmm... didn't Lovecraft write some kind of story about this condition?
There's not a cure, but there's a diet she can be on to reduce the smell.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trimethylaminuria
Needs to get a job on a trawler...
Chromal said "be grateful for what you have?"
Or in this case, what you don't have!!
My God that would suck.
Can't help but being reminded of the Bog of Eternal Stench from 'Labyrinth'. Falling in would cause one to stink horribly forever...
It's like it's real :(
Don’t rotten fish have the same desease?
How would the saying "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade" apply in this situation?
(ewwwwww!)
@#4 You beat me to it. Damn.
My friend's coworker had it. Her nickname was The Tuna Melt.
yt n dr lk Pln's sl gs nrmrkd.
TAK: Not anymore.
Why does this Australian woman have no accent?
Did she try squeezing a lemon over herself?
It may be genetic, but at least we know it doesn't get passed on to successive generations...
I don't think either is a healthy attitude towards life.
#14: When life gives you dead fish, buy a bass-O-matic!
jimbuck@#7, that's a valid criticism for conditions whose name consists of a description of the symptoms in some dead language.
It's not a valid criticism in this case: 'trimethylaminuria' does not mean 'stinks like dead fish' but rather 'disorder associated with trimethylamine breakdown', i.e. it is a description of the *condition*, not the symptoms.
I was going to make a crack about relocating to Innsmouth...
One of my high-school buddies was inna punk band long ago (late 70's) ... they wrote a song about a young woman at our school and the 'unusual' scent her private parts had (and no, I never tried to confirm it for myself).
The song?
'Rotten Rotten Tuna Fish'
Granted its not the same condition, but in school I studied a similar condition in which a person can suffer from a malodorous smell, but that a method of taking care of such things was electrolysis, and I am not referring to the large industrial version, but more the esthetic version where you have hair 'zapped*' off, just zap* the hair from the areas which typically cause the funk... and it also helps kill the smell (I don't think the lack of hair is the issue just the zapping* affects the persons ability to sweat in those areas)
*Zapping is a colloquial term, look up on wikipedia for Galvanic Electrolysis, and/or Thermolysis, to get a better idea of what happens.
"But unjugged fish is Halibut"
I think the title of this post is a little misleading and disingenuous -- I mean, I'm sure she did other stuff too.
My nose doesn't work at all.
Anybody have her number?
takuan gets disenvowelled! film @ #17. never thought i'd live to see it...
MINTY: There's new moderator in town. It just happened to you and me as well. Better watch those political comments on a non-political thread now.
Seems like their definition of "explain" and mine are rather different. Giving something a name which amounts to a description of what you've observed isn't an explanation, chaps. Well, unless you're a social scientist.
Also: where are all the yo' momma jokes? Most disappointing.
There was a documentary call Manchild Unmasked whose lead character suffered from trimethylaminuria.
""Manchild Unmasked" positions us downwind of performance artist Justin Callaway and his socially downtrodden alter ego, Frederick Manchild, and The Manchild 4, a group of musicians he has enlisted to help realize his dream of creating a subversive Top 40 hit. Wearing a giant prosthetic baby's head and reeking of rotting fish, Manchild belts out indie pop ballads of isolation while littering the city's public phone booths with bologna. This is all part of Callaway's grand scheme to publicly call into question conventional assumptions of normalcy and acceptance. There is only one thing that can stop him. He can't sing."
I have no idea if any of it is true but it is very very strange.
naw,same old moderators, same old rules, ye kin do what ye wish, save ye pay the score wi out the whinin'. Nae exceptions!
there's a the joke that ends: and the voice of God boomed down from the sky, "dammit, Adam, how am I going to get the smell off the fish?!?"
if medical science fixes the real world problem that joke won't be funny anymore.
TAKUAN: I said that because I hadn't seen AVRAM around here until recently. Did I miss something?
"Here's a video about another woman who has this unfortunate condition."
'Smell-O-Vision' would help. Even 'Scratch-and-Sniff'.
arrr, Avram be one o the Old. Musty and sech-like. Glabourous e'en.
I see. One of the Old Ones.
The Teresa, the Antinous and the Holy Avram - to these we entrust the Boingboing. May it ever be so.
#19 posted by RedShirt77
She does have an accent. It's American.
"Here's a video about another woman who has this unfortunate condition"
the text of that link is... unfortunate
This would be horrible, to smell bad for the rest of your entire life, and then there's nothing you can do about it. Wow, that sucks. I actually used to know someone who may have had a similar-but less severe-condition; she would smell bad regardless of whether or not she took a shower and applied deodorant two times a day, she still smelled awful.
#7 and #32: exactly. I smell bad -- I know that much! Now, how do I FIX it?
Wikipedia says "Getting tested is an important first step." Why? You already know you smell like a fish.
Wish I could make out what #17 was...
A minor character named Gazo Kovacs in the Young Adult novel "Genius Squad" by Catherine Jenks has the genetic condition of severe stink under stress. His condition plays a part in the plot - though it is not given a medical name, at least not in the first half of the book. Still reading.
@8:
Actually, Damon Knight wrote a short story called 'Country of the Kind,' in which a social outcast is genetically altered to smell terrible, warning others to stay away from him. I recall it being quite good. I wonder if he was on to something...
he was outcast for being capable of violence.
I wonder if chlorophyll would help in some way? Injections? Daily oral dosages?
To learn more about TMAU, go to the web site of the Monell Center, a nonprofit research instiutute in Philadelphia that studes taste and smell.
http://www.monell.org/tmau_h.htm
Wow this could be exactly what a girl in my school has! She smells just like a rotten fish.