Current Events in February 2014

What is it about tech-company executives and their tendency to conflate “nagging” with “producing a product that people actually want to use?”

Last November, for example, a couple of high-ranking Yahoos embarrassed themselves by criticizing rank-and-file Yahoo employees who agreed with the countless Yahoo customers who've said Yahoo's “new and allegedly improved Gmail-knockoff” email system is absolutely awful.

(Disclaimer: we always thought that if you're a business whose customers hate your new product offering, changing that one product might be easier than changing all your customers' minds. This might explain why we've never been hired as a high-ranking tech executive.)

David Marcus, president of PayPal, takes his nagging farther than any Yahoo exec dreamed of doing. Marcus discovered that PayPal employees haven't been using the new PayPal app to pay for purchases, which upset him so much he suggested they find new jobs. Here's what he wrote in an employee-wide email sent on Feb. 10:

“It’s been brought to my attention that when testing paying with mobile at Cafe 17 last week, some of you refused to install the PayPal app (!!?!?!!), and others didn’t even remember their PayPal password. That’s unacceptable to me, and the rest of my team, everyone at PayPal should use our products where available. That’s the only way we can make them better, and better.”

The “only” way? Listening to actual customer feedback somehow isn't an option? Maybe not, since PayPal customers aren't likely to be as enthusiastic about PayPal as Marcus would prefer. A properly enthusiastic PayPal employee is one who violates various federal and state-level anti-hacking laws to force companies to accept PayPal (and give PayPal a cut of the proceeds), whether said companies want to or not:

“Employees in other offices hack into Coke machines to make them accept PayPal because they feel passionately about using PayPal everywhere. I don’t see these behaviors here in San Jose.”

Lazy bums. Sounds like the San Jose PayPallers' collective work ethic is almost as dismal as that of our own colleagues: we're all allegedly passionate about consumer journalism here, yet none of us hack into other websites to make them accept our articles. Apparently this is a character flaw.

“In closing, if you are one of the folks who refused to install the PayPal app or if you can’t remember your PayPal password, do yourself a favor, go find something that will connect with your heart and mind elsewhere.”

So if you want to work for PayPal, it's not enough that you complete your assigned tasks in an effective and timely manner, nor is it even enough that you use PayPal for your everyday non-business purchases.

No.

You must set aside any notion that PayPal is merely a “job,” or even your “career”; PayPal is, like joining the priesthood or a nunnery, a calling which must “connect with your heart and mind” in addition to your smartphone app sending three percent of all purchases to expand the profit margin of the PayPal company.

Like the very hungry caterpillar, Comcast appears determined to eat everything in its path. Already the nation's largest cable operator, Comcast now says it will buy Time Warner Cable for $45 billion.

This comes just a few months after it completed its purchase of television network and movie studio NBCUniversal.

What this means for consumers in general is that an already dominant company will now have an even firmer grasp on TV and cable shows and movies and the distribution networks that deliver them.

For 8 million Time Warner Cable customers, it means they're about to become Comcast-- a/k/a XFINITY -- customers. This may be a good thing, as Comcast is generally regarded as maintaining high-quality Internet and TV services while Time Warner Cable is not on anyone's list of greatest companies ever. 

Another 3 million Time Warner Cable customers will be cast adrift, landing in the welcoming arms of Cablevision, Cox or Charter, which had made its own run at Time Warner.

The 8 million new customers will bring Comcast's total customer base to about 30 million. But the company insists consumers -- and, more significantly, regulators -- shouldn't worry. It will still have less than 30 percent of the market for pay TV subscribers, it insists.

"The combination of Time Warner Cable and Comcast creates an exciting opportunity for our company, for our customers, and for our shareholders," said Brian L. Roberts, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Comcast Corporation. 

Subscribers shouldn't worry unduly just yet. The acquisition faces a lengthy regulatory review before much of anything actually happens.

The widow of an suburban Chicago man accidentally crushed to death in a trash compactor last summer is now suing the homeowners' association of her condominium complex for wrongful death, pain and suffering.

Roger Mirro, who was legally blind, sought the key to his condominium's Dumpster last summer, hoping to retrieve a cell phone he thought he might have thrown down a garbage chute in his apartment building. 

According to the complaint filed by his widow, Donna, on the last day of his life, Mirro asked one of the condo association's board members for the key to the Dumpster. The board member handed over the keys, but “failed to warn Roger of the extreme danger that he would face it he accessed the Dumpster and triggered the electronic eye that activates the stationary industrial compactor which was attached to the Dumpster.”

Hence the problem: this was no ordinary passive Dumpster, but one outfitted with an automatic trash compactor. Even worse, according to the lawsuit, “Once activated, there was no control or safety device within the loading chamber of the compactor which would enable Roger to halt the progress of the hydraulic ram.”

Donna Mirro's lawsuit alleges that the condominium association failed to warn anybody about the dangers of the compactor, and especially its automatic-trigger electric eye.

Federal safety regulators want car owners to pay attention to recall notices that arrive in the mail. They say too many of the notices are being ignored when they arrive in piles of other mail.

So the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has decreed that starting February 18, all manufacturers must use a distinctive label on the required mailings that notify owners of recalled vehicles or equipment.

"Recalls only work if consumers are aware of them," said U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx. "This new label will allow consumers to quickly recognize recall notices mailed to their homes so they can act quickly to get their vehicles, child restraints, tires, or other motor vehicle equipment fixed."

The use of the new label is strictly limited to only the recalling manufacturers. This measure will help protect consumers from misleading sales and marketing materials that mimic, in their wording and presentation, legitimate safety recall alerts from manufacturers that can lead owners to purchase costly products and services that have no connection to a legitimate safety recall.

As always, NHTSA will monitor for inappropriate materials and will work closely with state and other federal authorities, including the FTC, to address enforcement issues.

The new label on safety recall notices is one of many new tools designed to improve recall notification for consumers.

New Android app

NHTSA also launched an app for Android devices that will provide users free access to key safety information, including recalls and safety performance. The new Android SaferCar app, which joins the iOS app for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch released last year, helps consumers find recall information and up-to-date vehicle safety information, search the agency's 5-Star Safety Ratings for vehicles by make and model, and subscribe to automatic notices about vehicle recalls, among other features.

The app also makes it simple to submit complaints to NHTSA regarding possible safety problems with a particular vehicle. App users receive important news and information from NHTSA on tire and child seat recalls as well.

Routine children's visits to the doctor for check-ups and vaccinations -- so-called well-child visits -- are important but a study finds they're also the source of hundreds of thousands of flu-like infections each year.

"Well child visits are critically important. However, our results demonstrate that healthcare professionals should devote more attention to reducing the risk of spreading infections in waiting rooms and clinics," said Phil Polgreen, MD, MPH, lead author of the study. Polgreen noted that infection control guidelines already exist.

"To increase patient safety in outpatient settings, more attention should be paid to these guidelines by healthcare professionals, patients, and their families," he said. 

In the study, researchers from the University of Iowa used data from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's (AHRQ) Medical Expenditure Panel Survey to examine the healthcare trends of 84,595 families collected from 1996-2008. 

They found an increased risk of flu-like illnesses in children and family members within two weeks of the visits. This risk translates to more than 700,000 potentially avoidable illnesses each year, costing more than $490 million annually. The study was published in the March issue of Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, the journal of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America.

The authors found that well-child visits for children younger than six years old increased the probability of a flu-like illness in these children or their families during the subsequent two weeks by 3.2 percentage points.

In a commentary accompanying the study, Lisa Saiman, MD, notes, "The true cost of flu-like illnesses are much higher since only a fraction result in ambulatory visits and many more cases are likely to result in missed work or school days. Furthermore, these flu-like illness visits are associated with inappropriate antimicrobial use."

The authors stress the importance of infection prevention and control in ambulatory settings, suggesting pediatric clinics follow recommended guidelines that include improving environmental cleaning, cough etiquette, and hand hygiene compliance.

"Even with interventions, such as the restricted use of communal toys or separate sick and well-child waiting areas, if hand-hygiene compliance is poor, and potentially infectious patients are not wearing masks, preventable infections will continue to occur," said Polgreen.

Pet therapy isn't new. For years aging specialists have known that having a dog, or spending time with a dog on a regular basis, is good for a senior's overall mental and physical health.

So when it came to an effort to encourage seniors to take part in daily exercise, a group of graduate students at Florida State University asked themselves -- would elderly residents of a retirement home be more inclined to exercise if dogs worked out along with them?

Doctoral students Ashley Artese and Brandon Grubbs enlisted residents of the Westminster Oaks Retirement Community in Tallahassee to take part in their experiment. They designed an exercise program that included dogs, recruited from the ranks of therapy pets.

“Between each exercise, we try to leave a little bit of time so people can pet the dogs and talk to the handlers,” said Artese, a first-year doctoral student in exercise science.

Is canine contact helpful?

The senior volunteers were split into two groups of seven. One exercised with dogs trained by Tallahassee Memorial Hospital’s pet therapy program. The other group exercised without them. The researchers hope to learn whether the contact with the animals was of any value.

They're measuring that value by looking at blood pressure, mood, physical ability and whether participants stick with the program. Three times a week, Artese and Grubbs take both groups through an exercise program. Walking around the room, biceps curls with light dumb bells and resistance band stretching are all a part of the routine.

The dogs are not just spectators. When the group lifts their dumbbells, one of the dogs – Bogey – picks up a plastic one. When the human participants walk around the room, the dogs walk along with them.

“Exercise classes are not something I call fun, but with the dogs, it is fun,” said Mary Stevenson, a Westminster Oaks resident who is participating in the study.

In fact, Stevenson admitted she was not all that interested in taking part in the exercise class until she heard about her canine workout partners. That, she said, prompted her and her husband to sign up.

Long history

Pet therapy is now a well-established practice, used mostly with children and the elderly. The earliest reported use of the concept occurred in the late 18th century in England at a facility for the mentally ill. The presence of the animals was believed to be an effective tool for socialization.

Sigmund Freud is reported to have had a number of dogs, including one that was always present during in ground-breaking sessions of psychoanalysis. He is said to have noted the presence of the animal helped his subjects to relax.

According to the Mayo Clinic, animal-assisted therapy is a growing field in health care. Dogs and other animals are increasingly being enlisted to help patients recover from serious health problems, such as cancer or heart disease.

More commonly, however, animals are employed to provide comfort and enjoyment for nursing home residents. An organization called Pet Therapy combines puppies and children for visits to retirement homes and says it has recorded positive effects on residents' physical, emotional and social interactions. The groups says the presence of pets has been shown to reduce blood pressure, increase sensory stimulation and inspire a sense of purpose.

Logical next step

To the Florida State researchers, having dogs become workout partners for seniors is a logical next step. At the end of this program, the professors and doctoral students will review the data to see how it might translate into a large-scale study.

“This will inform some larger studies we’re going to pursue,” Schmitt said.

If it proves effective the researchers say dogs may also be prove to be good gym companions for people struggling with obesity.

More than 400 consumers who fell victim to a scam that promoted video rental machines as a business opportunity will be finding something in the mail.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is sending out refund checks totaling more than $1.8 million, which -- combined with checks mailed by on two prior occasions -- will increase the total funds returned to consumers to more than $5.7 million. The funds now being returned to consumers came from the sale of property obtained by the FTC in its victory over the last remaining defendant in the case.

“People often pour everything they have into building a business,” said Jessica Rich, Director of the agency’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, “and the FTC is pleased that the scammers who deceived these investors have been held accountable to the tune of more than $5.7 million.”

The scam

According to the FTC American Entertainment Distributors -- five companies and five individuals -- deceived consumers into paying $28,000 to $37,500 each for video rental vending machines by telling them they could expect to earn as much as $80,000 a year. In fact, the FTC says, the defendants had no reasonable basis for their claims and all investors lost money.

The checks must be cashed on or before April 14, 2014. The amount of the refunds will vary depending on the amount lost by each consumer; more than 90% of the checks will be for more than $2,000.

Consumers who have questions, or who have not yet filed a complaint with the FTC and wish to do so, should call the Redress Administrator, Gilardi & Co. LLC, toll free, at 1-866-271-9147.  

Consumers -- it appears -- were reluctant to venture out into the cold in January, sending retail sales skidding 0.4%. It's the second straight drop following the revised decline of 0.1% the month before. Still, sales were up 2.6% from January 2013.

Among the big losers was car sales, which dropped 2.1% last month. Excluding that volatile category, overall retain sales were flat. Other losers included sporting goods -1.4%, clothing -0.9% and personal care items -0.6%.

Among sectors enjoying sales increases were gasoline stations +1.1%, building materials +1.4%, electronics +0.4% and food and beverage +0.2%.

The complete January report is available on the Census Bureau website.

Jobless claims

In a separate report, the government says first-time applications for unemployment benefits rose by 8,000 during the week ended February 8 -- to a seasonally adjusted total of 339,000. That's 4,000 more than the consensus estimate of economists surveyed by Briefing.com.

While the extreme winter weather may have played a role in the volatility seen in the past few weeks, analysts there hasn't been much deviation from the trend of 330,000-340,000, which normally support payroll growth in the 190,000 jobs per month range.

The 4-week moving average came in at 336,750 -- up 3,500 on the week. The moving average is considered a more reliable indicator of the labor market.

The full report can be found on the Labor Department website.

Roth Farms of Belle Glade, Fla., is recalling its “ bunched Curly Parsley” because it has the potential to be contaminated with Salmonella, an organism which can cause serious and sometimes fatal infections in young children, frail or elderly people, and others with weakened immune systems.

No illnesses have been reported to date in connection with this problem.

The recalled product, which was distributed in South Florida, comes in a 3 Wire Wooden Crate with the lot # AG01GN on the outside tag.

Production of the product has been suspended pending an investigation into the source of the problem.

Consumers with questions may contact the company at 1-561-996-2991

General Motors is recalling 619,122 model year 2005-2007 Chevrolet Cobalt, and 2007 Pontiac G5 vehicles.

In the affected vehicles, the weight on the key ring and/or road conditions or some other jarring event may cause the ignition switch to move out of the run position, turning off the engine. If the key is not in the run position, the air bags may not deploy if the vehicle is involved in a crash, increasing the risk of injury.

GM will notify owners, and dealers will replace the ignition switch, free of charge. The manufacturer has not yet provided a notification schedule.

Owners may contact Chevrolet at 1-800-222-1020 or Pontiac at 1-800-762-2737. GM's number for this recall is 13454.

Tesla fanboys became incoherent when a software update was described as a recallbut guess what? Toyota is preparing to recall nearly two million of its flagship Prius hybrids worldwide to correct a software glitch and no one is arguing with the terminology.

The software’s current settings could result in higher thermal stress in certain transistors, possibly damaging them. If this happens, various warning lights will illuminate and the vehicle can enter a failsafe mode, Toyota said, adding that "in rare circumstances, the hybrid system might shut down while the vehicle is being driven, resulting in the loss of power and the vehicle coming to a stop."

In the United States, the recall will affect about 700,000 model year 2010-2014 Prius vehicles and, combined, approximately 260,000 model Year 2012 Toyota RAV4, 2012-2013 Toyota Tacoma, and 2012-2013 Lexus RX 350.

Skid control

Toyota will update the motor/generator control ECU and hybrid control ECU software on certain model year 2010-2014 Prius vehicles.

Toyota will also update the skid control ECU software on certain 2012 Toyota RAV4, 2012-2013 Toyota Tacoma, and 2012-2013 Lexus RX 350 models in order to address an electronic circuit condition that can cause the Vehicle Stability Control, Anti-lock Brake, and Traction Control functions to intermittently turn off. If these systems are off, standard braking operation remains fully functional, the company said.

Toyota said it has received no reports of accidents or injuries associated with either condition.

As part of these recalls, owners of affected vehicles will receive a software update free of charge. Owners will be notified by first class mail when the software updates are available at their dealers.

What to do

Customers can get more informatio at www.toyota.com/recall or by calling the Toyota Customer Experience Center at 1-800-331-4331. Lexus customers can visit www.lexus.com/recall or call the Lexus Customer Satisfaction Center at 1-800-25-LEXUS (1-800-255-3987).

As always, customers should either use the contact information above or wait to receive their recall notice by mail. Dealers will not have specific information until the recall campaign begins. 

Many consumers have complained about Google's practice of "reading" emails to select appropriate advertisements and a new plug-in may make those complaints more intense.

The new Gmail plug-in called Streak informs Gmail users exactly when emails they sent were opened  — and where the recipients were when they opened them. Meanwhile, the lucky recipients of these Gmail emails aren't informed of how much personal information they're broadcasting to the email sender.

Streak did not immediately respond to ConsumerAffairs' request for comment. But in fairness, it should be noted that Streak bills itself as a business app -- saying it provides "CRM (customer relationship management) in your inbox."  As the Streak site puts it:

You already live in your inbox; shouldn't your CRM?

Streak lets you keep track of all your deals right from your inbox. We let you group emails from the same customer together into one view and push that customer through your pipeline. When a new email comes in, you'll have all the context you need.

That's fine but the Streak application would also be fantastically useful for stalkers or stalker wannabes — if you don't know where your ex is now living, sending her a Gmail message and waiting to see where she opened it is much easier and cheaper than, say, hiring a private detective or getting a job with the NSA.

When "On The Media" blogger PJ Vogt tested the Streak application, here's what he found:

I sent Alex, my colleague, an email, and Streak was able to get me within about five minutes of our workplace. 

It's not hard to imagine a situation where this could be badly abused. People who've been stalked, threatened, or harassed, for instance, should be able to open an email without unwittingly giving away their location.

So what can you do if you don't want to be tracked? Well, you can start by not allowing images to autoload in your email client. Also, in my (very rudimentary) tests I found that Gmail, for whatever reason, offered better protection than my office's Exchange email client. (With Gmail, I only found out when Alex had opened up my email. It was the Exchange client that gave away his neighborhood.)

Of course, the fact that Gmail seems to offer its own account-holders some protection against this is scant comfort to people who do not have Gmail accounts, yet can now be effortlessly be stalked by anyone who does.

Google's unofficial corporate motto is “Don't be evil.” This is excellent advice, though maybe they should take it a step further – “Don't help others be evil, either.” Abolishing stalker apps would be a good start.

Sequels are almost always worse than the originals, so maybe it's not surprising that so far, the various followups to the Flappy Bird story have proven vastly less inspiring than the first tale.

The capsule summary of the original story is this: the immensely popular game app Flappy Bird disappeared from app stores last weekend. Game developer Dong Nguyen said he pulled the plug on it because the game proved too addictive. So he chose to walk away from up to $50,000 per day in ad revenue rather than keep his addictive app out there.

However, Flappy Bird addicts desperate for a fix could still get one via various Flappy knockoffs, including Flappy Whale, Flappy Plane, Flappy Angry Birds, and others.

Not so nice

That was a nice story. Here are the less-nice followups: first, the TrendLabs security blog discovered that the void left by the real Flappy Bird takedown is being filled by malicious Flappy Bird clones that are “Premium Service Abusers” — programs that send automatic messages to “premium” numbers, resulting in unwanted charges on your phone bill. (And, as always, many of these programs also steal whatever personal information is in your phone, too.)

Second, claims that Dong Nguyen has given up $50K in daily ad revenue aren't quite accurate, either — though Flappy Bird is no longer available for new players to download, the 50 million or so people who've downloaded it already are still playing and still generating ad revenue. (In fairness to Nguyen, though, he is not the one who claimed to be giving up $50K per day in ad revenue; that number was an estimate produced by outside observers.)

Smartphone owners with the legitimate Flappy Bird app on their phones tried cashing in by selling their phones on eBay, and received bids as high as $99,000 — until eBay pulled the plug on all such auctions, claiming that smartphones may not be sold on eBay unless they're restored to their original factory settings.

In recent years couples – young couples in particular – have begun to put more stock in financial responsibility as a relationship criteria. A low credit score, it turns out, can be a deal breaker.

A 2013 survey by a division of Experian found 96% of women listed “financial responsibility” as an important trait in a mate. Ninety-one percent of men found it important. 

Now, a new survey commissioned by the National Foundation for Credit Counseling (NFCC) has found that large amounts of debt can be toxic for romance. According to the survey, 37% of respondents would not marry someone until their debt was repaid. Ten percent would marry but not help pay the debt while seven percent would take the somewhat extreme action of breaking off the relationship.

While love and romance have long been grounded in physical attraction, money is beginning to hold greater sway. Undoubtedly the tough economic times that have prevailed since the 2008 financial crisis have played a big role. But it isn't just about money.

Indicator of other problems

“When considering the negative ramifications of debt, people may not realize that the associated problems can go beyond credit scores and interest rates. Debt can also have serious, long-lasting personal implications,” said Gail Cunningham, spokesperson for the NFCC. “It appears that debt overrides love, at least temporarily, when deciding to move forward in a relationship. It’s money over marriage.”

The increasing role of debt in the decision to take a casual relationship to the next level may be particularly true with young adults who emerge from college with tens of thousands of dollars in credit card and student loan debt. If two young people start their working lives, each with credit card and student loan debt, the total could easily be six figures. It's like paying a mortgage but not getting a house.

Since nearly half of all marriages in America now end in divorce, it's easy to conclude that financial strain is at least a contributing factor. Cunningham says it's no surprise that people are reluctant to start off on the wrong financial foot.

Negative consequences

Having too much debt can make it harder to qualify for loans. Having a low credit score – perhaps because of late payment on that debt and other bills – just compounds the problem. With a low credit score it can be difficult to qualify for a home mortgage or buy a car, rent an apartment, obtain insurance or land a job.

It's true that both people in a couple have individual credit scores. Your mate's score doesn't affect yours, except in one important respect.

At some point both of you, as a couple, may need to pool your financial resources in order to take out a loan for a major purchase. In this case, one person’s low credit score may torpedo the approval, or if the lender extends credit, it may be at a higher interest rate.

However, there is a way to improve the credit of one party in the couple. If the person with good credit opens an individual account, then adds the person with a low credit score, that low score will rise, as long as the account is kept current and the debt balance is not excessive.

Love and money

In the end, says Cunningham, love and money cannot be separated. Daily life is all about making financial decisions. If one party makes good decisions on a regular basis while the other makes bad decisions, discord is certain to follow.

Talking about money early in the relationship is one way to make sure it goes to the next level, if that's what both people want. That means sharing all sources of income, existing debt obligations, credit reports and scores, along with personal preferences about decisions involving loaning money to family and friends, or attitudes toward spending and saving.

Anything controlled by a computer can be hijacked by a hacker, so it's no surprise that the various scanners which the Transportation Security Administration uses to inspect the luggage and bodies of would-be flyers have this same vulnerability — though it is surprising to learn just how vulnerable they are.

On Feb. 11, Dark Reading digital magazine, covering the Kaspersky Security Analyst Summit in Costa Rica, noted that the “Rapiscan” machines deployed in various American airports can easily be manipulated by outside attackers or TSA insiders in order to display false images. From a security perspective, this focused more on the possibility that terrorists might doctor images to make dangerous items appear innocuous.

However, in light of TSA's frequent history of false positives — to date, TSA agents have confiscated everything from a GI Joe doll's four-inch plastic rifle to a toddler's toy Star Wars lightsaber for presumptive national security reasons— it is perhaps of equal concern that TSA scanners could be manipulated to make innocuous items appear dangerous.

Though all computers are at risk of manipulation, the Rapiscan machines are designed to be more vulnerable than most. At the Kaspersky summit, Billy Rios, who is Qualys' director of threat intelligence, said that “The worst-case scenario is someone manipulates this in a way that the operator doesn't know a threat is in the bag ... by design, the [Rapiscan] software allows you to manipulate the image for training [purposes] … The TSA requires this super-dangerous feature on all of these baggage scanners.”

Rios reported some other embarrassing vulnerabilities he and other security experts discovered in various TSA systems -- for example, they could bypass login screens by merely typing a user name with a special character, which was then read as an error and resulted in an automatic login.

As Rios said: “These bugs are actually embarrassing. It was embarrassing to report them to DHS -- the ability to bypass the login screen. These are really lame bugs.”

You might not think that earwax is very interesting but researchers at the Monell Center in Philadelphia would disagree. They've found that plain old earwax just may be an overlooked source of significant personal information, just like -- you know -- underarm odors.

"Our previous research has shown that underarm odors can convey a great deal of information about an individual, including personal identity, gender, sexual orientation, and health status," said study lead author George Preti, PhD, an organic chemist at Monell. "We think it possible that earwax may contain similar information."

Preti's interest in earwax was piqued by the finding that a small change in a gene known as ABCC11 is related both to underarm odor production and also to whether a person has wet or dry earwax.

It turns out that individuals of East Asian (e.g., Chinese, Korean and Japanese) and Native American descent have a form of the ABCC11 gene that codes both for dry-type earwax and also for reduced underarm body odor compared to other ethnic types, who typically produce a wet-type ear wax and greater body odor.

Sweat glands

You may not have thought much about this but earwax, scientifically known as cerumen, is a mixture of secretions from specialized sweat glands with fatty materials secreted from sebaceous glands.

To explore whether earwax has a characteristic odor, the researchers collected earwax from 16 healthy men: eight Caucasian and eight of East Asian descent. Each sample was placed into a vial, which was gently heated for 30 minutes to promote release of airborne molecules known as volatile organic compounds ( VOCs), many of which are odorous.

The analysis revealed 12 VOCs were consistently present in the earwax of all the men. However, the amount of VOCs varied as a function of the subject's ethnic background, with Caucasians having greater amounts of 11 of the 12 VOCs than East Asians.

"In essence, we could obtain information about a person's ethnicity simply by looking in his ears. While the types of odorants were similar, the amounts were very different," said study lead author Katharine Prokop-Prigge, a Monell chemist.

The researchers suspect that the fatty nature of earwax makes it a likely repository for lipid-soluble odorants produced by certain diseases and the environment.

Prokop-Prigge points out that at least two odor-producing metabolic diseases (maple syrup urine disease and alkaptonuria) can be identified in earwax before they can be diagnosed using traditional techniques such as blood and urine analysis.

"Odors in earwax may be able to tell us what a person has eaten and where they have been," said Preti. "Earwax is a neglected body secretion whose potential as an information source has yet to be explored."

The study is being published in the Journal of Chromatography B.