Picture this. You are visiting with Grandma (socially distanced, of course). Right there beside you is the glass bowl of Werther’s Originals, Lemon Drops, and Starlight Mints. What may seem like the usual candy favored by your parents or grandparents could now possibly be used to help scientists and researchers during this pandemic. Plus, I know some of us don’t like to admit it, but Werther’s Originals are delicious, you know it, I know it… come on.
THE Ohio State University scientists (as an OU graduate, I hated writing that) are testing a possible tool that could be used to detect cases of coronavirus. What is that tool, you may ask? It’s hard candy. Researchers investigate if somebody in the medical community can use candies to screen patients to lose taste or smell. Who would’ve thought candy would be a key player in such crazy times as the Coronavirus Pandemic!
The National Institute of Health recently gave Ohio State’s research team $300,000 to find straightforward strategies to identify people who may be infected with the virus, mainly asymptomatic people. 86% of people who have tested positive for Covid reported a loss of smell. Other symptoms vary among cases, but the loss of smell remains the most consistent.
So what is an easy-to-deploy strategy that can detect a loss of smell along with taste? Well, Project co-leader Christopher Simmons, an associate professor of food science and technology at OSU, believes that tasting and smelling hard candies is the answer, or at least will help. Eight different flavors of hard candies will be used in this testing, and all will be the same color. We don’t know the exact flavors, but we know they will be specifically chosen for this test. Still, we can assume something along the lines of Cinnamon Hard Candy Disks, which are sure to get your senses moving.
Researchers will follow two thousand eight hundred people for 90 days, and each participant will be asked to sniff and eat a piece of hard candy (not such a bad gig, where do I sign up?). They will then be able to log what they taste and smell into an app. According to Simmons, tasting and smelling these candies will allow a robust assessment of the two routes' function: the nose and back of the throat. When participants are recording their results, they will identify the flavor of the candy and the intensity. Participants who report a sudden drop in intensity will immediately be told to quarantine and get a Covid-19 test.
Simmons believes this project to be ideal since people will want to do it. Everyone loves candy, and during such tough and crazy times, maybe we do need a little more sweetness in our lives. Hopefully, this testing plays out nicely, and candy can come to help save the day.
