This is the Guardian. It started with fresh air smelling bad. I noticed that fresh air just smelled completely different, unlike anything I've ever smelled smelled and it was disgusting.

Even you know the smell of your favorite perfume or your loved ones is not familiar anymore. One of the most well-known side effects of COVID-19 is losing your sense of smell.

But with cases still high in the UK and rising across Europe, growing numbers of people are

experiencing something else after catching the virus, where smells and tastes become distorted and unpleasant.

After that, food started to taste bad,

mostly meat and oil at first, It elicits the same innate response of repulsion.

This is a condition known as Perosmia.

It can be a really unsettling and distressing experience and scientists still don't fully understand what causes it.

The only thing is time, there's no cure. Doctors have just said you have to wait and I don't know when it will get better.

But new research is starting to uncover some clues.

I'm Madeline Finley and from the Guardian, you're a guardian science correspondent and this is something that happened to you after you caught COVID. How did your sense of smell change? I suddenly started noticing this really

horrible smell on freshly cleaned clothes when I was hanging up them up on the washing line. I can't really describe it, I can't put my finger on how I would describe it, but it's this kind of like really sickly aroma, almost a bit like dog food, just kind of masked with this sort of really sweet

chemically smell but then I started smelling it on other things so I started smelling it on

my daughter's hair and my husband's hair.

And since then I kind of keep detecting it as people walk by me on the street and

just kind of turns my stomach.

It's really very peculiar indeed. I mean that does sound really horrible and

actually it chimes with what we heard from the Guardian readers who shared their experiences

with the Parosmia as well. Are there any common things that seem to trigger people?

You know, the kind of classic things that seem to trigger it are things like

onions,

onions garlic, some people are reporting toiletries,

...