Nowadays even herbalists recommend lab tests to verify the results of sniff tests, but several infectious diseases can be diagnosed fairly effectively by the nose. Large amounts of some kinds of virus and bacteria produce distinctive odors.
Measles and related virus have a slightly bitter, acrid smell. When I've smelled it my thought process has been "It's not walnuts...it's not that old hair oil men mostly stopped using in the 1960s...oh right, it's one of those virus the oldtimers used to call different kinds of measles."
Norovirus smells like norovirus. If you've smelt it you've been dealt it and, if your resistance to this virus is as feeble as mine, within 48 hours you are going to feel completely useless until your digestive system is completely empty. You will recognize the odor if you smell it again. At least it can warn you to eat very lightly and drink lots of water. The best way to minimize the misery of norovirus is not to have much solid material inside you when it hits.
Rhinovirus is described by some people as producing a sensation (sometimes of coldness) in the nostrils and sometimes as producing a lingering bitter smell that stays there.
The common cold itself, the body's antibodies to many kinds of infection, is sometimes said to smell garlicky. People who choose to smell garlicky do so in order to boost resistance to infections. The connection may have been discovered because people who have not been eating garlic generate a faintly garlicky odor when fighting infections.
Coliform bacteria have an odor I associate with corroded metal, old coins and keys.
I'd heard that salmonella bacteria have an odor and thought, well, I didn't seem to smell it, until an unusually nasty infection brought the point home to me. Salmonella produces an odor that reminds people of hot yeast bread, possibly because of interaction with yeasts in the body--it's not noticeable in food, but it's noticeable in patients. I was like, "Oh is that what that is." Though it's different from the sugary, fruity, acetone odor of diabetes I had always associated it with diabetic patients, and as I liked some of the diabetic patients I knew early in life, I'd always thought it was a rather nice smell. Other than during a glyphosate reaction in 2021 I'd never noticed salmonella causing anything worse than a little irregularity. When the lethal strain of salmonella causes typhoid or "putrid fever," the yeasty odor gives way to a carrion odor caused by actual damage to body tissues.
And strep bacteria have an odor I find easiest to explain as a nasty body odor minus the food and ammonia. Most people carry around a fair number of harmless streppy-bugs (they're considered friendly bacteria) so if we don't bathe, change clothes and sheets, or clean furniture regularly, we will start to smell streppy. It can literally be a sickening odor if the concentration of bacteria is strong and the person inhaling is not strong. The bacteria can produce usually mild infections in the throat or in open skin wounds. The odor of strep tells most people to do something so that they don't have to continue smelling it, like clean the house or wash some laundry or at least add an extra yard to the healthy distance we keep away from certain people, but in the 1960s there were some "Sick Greens" who claimed it was natural and earthy and good. I think most of them know better by now. I think more of the Sick Greens died from drug reactions and AIDS than from strep, but it couldn't have helped
Well...last week Cat Queen Serena gave birth to kittens, as noted in last week's status updates. Her showing me where the kittens were was normal. Her wanting me to look closely at them and not leave them was a warning of trouble.
I had learned, from past experience, about the primary cause of this trouble. When adult cats seem to be thriving on cheap food (and surviving glyphosate vapor drift), but either or both of these things is affecting them, perhaps more than the cats know...it is possible for a big strong healthy-looking cat to give birth to "wormy" kittens. Whether parasitized by intestinal worms or other things, these kittens' sickliness discourages the mother cat from cleaning them. Serena loved and fed her three tiny kittens but she was trying to tell me, as she succeeded in telling me a few hours later, that she wanted me to clean them. Kittens greatly prefer not to be cleaned by humans (with wet paper towels) and are healthier if cleaned by their mothers, but mother cats' instincts warn them not to clean sick kittens.
Vets recommend worm treatment for the mother cat, when this happens, and some vets recommend regular worm treatments for all outdoor cats on general principles, which sounds like the kind of overkill that's likely to breed super-parasites to me. All the Cat Sanctuary cats will be getting worm treatment, anyway, and it's to be hoped that they will be getting steady supplies of Purina Kitten Chow as distinct from the cheap, grain-based alternative. (The Dollar Store used to sell bags of Heartland Kitten Chow that were true generic equivalents of Purina Kitten Chow, but I've not seen those in a store for a long time.)
Sometimes parasite-infected kittens can be kept alive long enough to survive treatment and mature more or less normally, but permanent damage may have been done. More often they just didn't come into this world to stay.
Additionally, the Bad Neighbor had sprayed, I could feel rather than smell, that unholy mix of dicamba and glyphosate people use when they've used glyphosate enough to produce crops of resistant "weeds." (All the nuisance plants my parents and I tried to extirpate all these years, Johnson grass and Bermuda grass and japonica honeysuckle and cinnamon vines and the native Bidens, plus the invasive Bidens called Spanish Needles, and even the loathsome datura or locoweed, thrive on glyphosate. So do molds and fungus infections of all sorts, except edible mushrooms, which can die out or can soak up high concentrations of glyphosate and become toxic to eat. Around this time of year people approach me wanting to buy morels, and if I have any I wouldn't dare sell them.) Maybe, Serena and I hoped, 48 hours of powdered charcoal mixed up in water would clean the poison out of them, and they'd be all right. I think Serena wanted to believe that. I know I did. So I tried.
Treatment completed, weather heavenly, I took the kittens out for Serena to inspect. She had concerns, but she was thrilled. She quivered all over. Serena is not what most people would call a "sweet," demonstrative cat. Quite the contrary. Normally she prefers rough games to cuddling, and if you get any ideas about cuddling her like a human baby she's apt to reply, nonverbally, with "No, let's play tag--or maybe war." But she gathered up those kittens and clung and purred and meowed. If cats shed tears, she would have done. Something was still wrong, but they had healthy appetites and at least she still had milk to give them...before she gave them back to me for cleaning, again.
And the Professional Bad Neighbor sprayed more poison, less than a city block away, over the curve of the hill, but upwind from us relative to the prevailing wind. This time I felt, rather than smelling, that it was glyphosate. "Roundup" sold for suburban lawn use is scented with an additional toxic chemical; the generic glyphosate and mix sold for farm use aren't scented. I can tell which one I'm breathing because the only reaction to dicamba vapors I notice is a scratchiness in the throat, and my glyphosate reactions are long elaborate affairs that start with a moment of acute grumpiness, may include sluggishness or even narcolepsy, always involve a spastic colon reaction with both constipation and diarrhea in turns, and usually feature enough inflammation along the entire digestive tract, from the mouth down, to produce small short-lived bleeding ulcers. The amount of vapor inhaled or contaminated food swallowed seems to determine whether the spastic colon effects will be easy to work through without being noticed by other people, or melodramatic. I've mentioned, in years when glyphosate was used more recklessly, seeing puddles of blood-flecked froth beside the road. Those puddles came from people who weren't accustomed to life with the celiac gene, and didn't know when to stay home. When I need to stay home, I stay home.
Why don't we have laws protecting people, and animals, from this kind of recurring torture? Last week I kept spitting out strips of dead tissue that had flaked off my inflamed lips and tongue. Once, a few years ago, I looked into a toilet bowl and saw a finger-sized piece of tripe floating around, and I hadn't eaten any tripe--that was dead tissue out of my own inflamed intestines. If I went to my neighbor's house and tore two or three inches of surface tissue off his face, the law would have something to say about that, we can be sure. But the law says nothing about his tearing two or three inches of surface tissue off a part of me where it's less easily spared...because some people make a lot of money off glyphosate and other poisons.
All of which poisons, I might add, are completely unnecessary. Glyphosate is supposed to kill plants, although it actually breeds bigger, more aggressive specimens of the most undesirable ones. You don't need poisons to kill plants. As a member of the animal kingdom, endowed with the sovereign power of rapid voluntary movement, you can do whatever you like to plants, and most of them have no defense against it. If you don't have the fortitude to cut back plants where you don't want them, you can enlist the help of creatures that eat the unwanted plants (most goats will ignore anything else when they can munch up poison ivy), or burn the unwanted plants, or wilt them with salt and vinegar, or--better yet, in places like road verges and railroads where you want bare gravel--kill them with boiling-hot water. There is no excuse for spraying poisons on plants. It is pure undiluted stupidity--in most cases. When it's done for the purpose of making neighbors unhappy on their own land, which has been in the family for at least seven generations, that has to be called evil.
Glyphosate apologists keep throwing information my way about other things that produce similar effects to all the many different effects glyphosate has on different people. It's a fascinating study, in a gruesome way. For example, while some cats--Dusty the shelter cat was one--show internal bleeding as a primary glyphosate reaction, and young kittens often just drop dead after breathing glyphosate vapors, some female animals who show no consistent reaction themselves are apt to give birth to damaged or non-viable young. Serena's daughter Silver has reared only one kitten that lived to grow up; more years than not, she's never tried to rear kittens of her own at all. She has not been spayed. She is not sterile. She is very close to old sterile Sommersburr, but not to the extent that she doesn't accept help from other tomcats to produce kittens. She is a social cat whose kittens are positively wanted/ But she's given birth to some things that looked like premature kittens but weren't alive, at least one thing that belonged in a horror movie, and some kittens that grew weaker and finally died after successive glyphosate spray poisonings. There's actually a gene that causes that pattern of reaction; it's been studied at length in rodents. It seems to be more common in southern Europe, and parts of America where people and animals come from southern Europe, than in the rest of the world. Did Silver have an ancestor from Spain or Italy? All science is at least interesting...
Anyway, I have now read a fair bit about ways to replicate all the torments glyphosate sprayers have inflicted on people and animals who are more sensitive to this poison than they are. I used to think the way to show glyphosate sprayers what a celiac reaction is like would involve a coloscopy done with an immersion blender in the place where the camera ought to be, but that's inaccurate. Repeated injections with enough typhoid fever culture to overpower any vaccines they ever had would get a closer parallel effect. I'm not sure why glyphosate apologists want to give any celiac this kind of ideas.
But enough gross-outs. The kittens' condition wasn't gross--not, at least, to people who are familiar with the basic condition of newborn kittens. Kittens are not born with the ability to digest food completely. They can absorb nourishment only from cat's milk or a synthetic substitute for it; they absorb so little of the nourishment in this milk that their bodywastes are pure cat's-milk cheese, which, if the kittens are healthy, their mothers cheerfully recycle through their own digestive tracts. Rearing a kitten that is not being cleaned every few hours by an adult cat means gently stroking its hindquarters while holding a napkin to catch the white, almost odorless, curds and whey that come out. If the kitten is sick what comes out may contain blood, parasites, or in the best case traces of solid food it tried to eat, and thus seem more like the bodywastes of any other animal but a kitten. What these kittens left on paper napkins was just barely noticeably, or not noticeably, yellower than milk. I thought they might have a chance, I kept cleaning them, giving them charcoal mixed with bottled water, and letting them rest on a clean flannel shirt beside me.
Before their eyes open kittens can crawl a few yards at a time, and they will if they get chilled. They are heat-seeking mechanisms. They don't seek direct heat, as adult cats often do; they're not yet insulated in thick fur. They seek something close to the mother cat's body temperature A human's body warmth will do. Serena's kittens were obsessive snugglers. At first I tried to minimize direct contact with them, but if they sensed a hand near them, they wanted to crawl onto it and stretch out full-length on it.
After the second meal of their lives was ruined the kittens lost ground; they cried more, and stopped crying when petted, and I didn't think it was likely to make so much difference. It'd be a miracle if the Professional Bad Neighbor didn't kill them before they were weaned anyway. Hours after the second meal and first subsequent cleaning-by-human, the first kitten gave two or three real shrieks of pain and went into a sort of spastic, rather than feverish, delirium.
"That's how to tell it's parasites," a vet told me, years ago, looking at another kitten. "There's nothing to do for the kittens but put them to sleep, and give a good worm treatment to the mother cat."
So, maybe the kittens owed some of their charm to illness. Some kittens cuddle because they're affectionate and sociable by nature, and some because a sickly "wormy" condition produces discomfort they want to relieve by snuggling. Maybe the evil the Professional Bad Neighbor meant to do them worked out, in the long run, for their good. Spray poisoning indisputably aggravated their suffering but they probably wouldn't have lived long anyway. I kept Traveller alive for most of two years, her adoptive family kept a long-ago "wormy" kitten called Graymina alive for a year and a half--that's above average. Usually "wormy" kittens live months, not years.
I still think live video coverage of his being fitted with a colostomy bag at the last possible moment, after a full three weeks of unrelieved typhoid fever, prior to the skin peels and gassing and all the other treatments that would replicate the other things this disgrace to humankind has done, would be a salutary way for the Professional Bad Neighbor to spend his last days.
Anyway now the kittens swarmed over me, and the shirt and jeans that were due for a wash, and the shirt they were wrapped up in that was no longer clean, with any antibodies they might have been able to absorb from the milk being adsorbed by charcoal. While they were taking it the charcoal would also mop up the bacteria in their systems, and possibly some of the parasites.
Then, in the order of their birth, they went through a few cramps and spasms into deep comas. The eldest seemed almost dead on Friday morning, the male went into a similar state late Friday night, and the youngest reached that state just before her midday meal on Saturday. Some reflexes persisted; the excretory reflexes stopped. (Sometimes a comatose kitten's digestive system is still functional.). They seemed completely...paralyzed. That's one of the less common glyphosate reactions, but it's known to occur in humans and other animals.
So they were no longer taking charcoal.
So, by Saturday afternoon, the office where they were resting in peace smelled septic. What does a septic wound smell like? Primarily like strep bacteria. Urgh urgh ick ick. Could the kittens smell themselves? Feel bacteria colonizing their bodies, without being able even to cough? Horrid thought.
Regular readers may remember the winter, early in the history of this web site, when another kitten had a strep infection that wouldn't go away. Everybody loved that kitten. Even when she became a streppy little stinker. Nobody else showed any reaction to the bacteria except that, after she'd been snuggled across my neck, breathing germs on my face all night, I warned people: "If you annoy me I may breathe on you." A little bad breath is not the end of the world...
...Except when it is. Some strains of strep are considered such "friendly" bacteria that they're used to ferment yogurt, sold as "probiotic supplements" for healthy people after antibiotic treatment--but immune-compromised people have developed pneumonia from exposure to probiotic supplements.
Iris was Serena's great-great-great-grand-aunt. Their markings and purrsonalities were different, but their general colors and temperament come from the same genes. And what about their resistance to strep...if not Serena's, then the kittens'?
A comatose cat assumes room temperature, but some strep bacteria can survive on rich cultures, like milk, egg, or blood, for more than two weeks at freezing temperatures; that's how yogurt, even frozen yogurt, keeps its probiotic benefits. In warm weather, dead or even dry surfaces may reduce streppy-bugs' rate of reproduction but, in the absence of other factors like a healthy animal's antibodies, a comatose cat's internal temperature is not going to kill strep.
On Saturday afternoon I made a dreaded decision. I buried the kittens under a pile of wood and trash in the trash barrel, and lighted it. If they felt anything, they wouldn't feel very much for very long. And few, if any, bacteria survive a fire.
And, knowing Serena, I'd guess that by July she will have either given birth to or adopted another batch of kittens. Not "wormy" ones, either.
Rearing healthy kittens is not easy in a glyphosate-poisoned world but, if anyone can do it, Serena can.
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