Ellie's raising awareness

malory · Post by **malory** » Sun Apr 06, 2014 5:58 pm

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news ... ng-3380410

Hi all

Ellie has not only done the above article for The Mirror (UK national paper) but she is also on BBC Radio 5 live tomorrow (Monday 7th April 2014 UK) at 8.40. Tune in if you can!

Great job, Ellie. Brilliant work on our behalf!!

halitosisux · Post by **halitosisux** » Sun Apr 06, 2014 6:34 pm

What would raise awareness is if people knew it's not rare to develop acquired/secondary TMAU. 1 in 100 people apparently have levels of TMA in their blood that are high enough to start causing them to smell. Only a handful of people in the UK have the rarest form of TMAU, and if it says Ellie was struck down with it at the age of 30, then it's not the rare form, it's the acquired type of TMAU which isn't rare.
These media reports get it wrong all the time. Or am I wrong?

malory · Post by **malory** » Thu Apr 10, 2014 5:23 pm

You're absolutely right! But the media are the media, and they say what they want. They insist on the 'rarity' of odour conditions because that's what they want to believe, I suppose.
Poor Ellie insists on telling them it's a misnomer to refer to TMAU as fish odour syndrome but they still ignore this fact. In one article they talk about her spraying herself with perfume, which she never does, of course, as she knows it makes the odour worse.

Still, she did more than a fantastic job raising awareness in 3 newspaper articles, a radio interview with Ann Diamond and also 'This Morning' on ITV. She's helped address a taboo and I'm grateful to her.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01wzs1r

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/artic ... -fish.html

http://www.dailystar.co.uk/real-life/37 ... S-and-FISH

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news ... ng-3380410

halitosisux · Post by **halitosisux** » Thu Apr 10, 2014 7:05 pm

It's fantastic to read that Ellie has been able to bring her problem under some control, and above all else, to actually have a medical diagnosis and to be able to explain to people why she smells when she does.

Raising awareness like this increases the general interest, not only into this particular problem, but also how important our gut flora is and how easily it can be affected and of the far reaching impact an innocuous change can have on our lives, in ways we still don't yet understand, such as with cancer, asthma, alzheimer's disease, etc. It's not all about our genetics, it's also what we're exposed to in life, whether for good or bad, like antibiotics and other drugs that interfere with our body in ways that are really only now beginning to be fully realized.

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