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A breath of stale air

Why is it that the people in possession of the worst smelling breath in the world are always the ones breathing the most? They practically pant like dogs with their mouths gaping open, the stench of foul stale breath spewing forth...

Unfortunately for the rest of us, these Halitosis-sufferers are often some of the happiest people around! They seem to find anything funny, laughing every 5 seconds with a great big “HA!” spraying anyone game enough to be within 3 metres of them with a breath of stale air.

I knew a girl at uni whose breath constantly smelt of acidopholous yoghurt: kind of sweet smelling but with that distinct underlying off-milk odour. Each time I had a lecture where she was going to be there, I’d buy some breath mints and offer them to her in the hope she’d take the packet and save me having to sit with my hand subtly covering my nose pretending I’m really interesting in what she was saying.

She was a really nice girl but I could only spend a limited amount of time within close proximity of her and her breath. I've heard that she’s a Doctor now, so I hope that for her patient’s sake that she’s now a big fan of tic tacs or something.

It's a weird phenomenon that people cannot smell their own odours.

Along with bad breath, BO is a terrible thing to subject another human to.
On the weekend my husband had to do our grocery shopping with our breath held for most of the trip. There was an old man shopping in the store who smelled so bad that I'm sure he was making the fresh produce wilt as he passed by!

If the army could have bottled his BO, it would have wiped out even the most determined of terrorists exposed to it as the odour soaked into their beards! It really was that awful: a sickly sweet sweat smell combined with a more savoury onion and stinky feet is about the best I can describe it as. Oh, and it was an 19 on the scale from 1 to 10 of potentcy.

His odour left a trail for about 10 metres of stench behind him (where we seemed to keep getting stuck as we wound our way up and down the aisles). Surely his shopping companion (his daughter, I think and who didn't stink) could detect that her dad ponged to high-heaven?!?! He looked fairly clean from the safety zone of 15 metres that we were trying to keep, but clearly there's something going seriously wrong with his hygeine routine...