The gasoline that gives millions of schoolchildren with hours of fun and gives stink bombs their disgusting smell could quickly present doctors with new treatments for conditions starting from strokes to chronic arthritis.

Some researchers are even trying to use hydrogen sulphide - the supply of rotten eggs' disagreeable odour - to place patients with strokes or serious accidents into a type of suspended animation to help them survive extreme traumas. This analysis is now being backed by the US army, who believe it could help their surgeons deal with accidents suffered by troopers in battle.

'Hydrogen sulphide is made in very low doses in the physique and, far from doing harm, it has turn out to be clear that it could do a great deal of good,' mentioned Dr John Wallace, a pharmacologist at the University of Calgary in Canada. 'It is found within the brain and can be thought to regulate blood strain. It is quite pervasive, in fact.'

Hydrogen sulphide is corrosive, foul-smelling, flammable and lethal in enough concentrations. A single breath can kill. Yet the gasoline has lately turn into a buzzword in scientific circles following discoveries that in tiny doses it plays a major role in influencing some chemical pathways within the body.

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We are initially of an expanding subject that would have enormous clinical implications,' mentioned David Lefer, cardiovascular physiologist at New York's Albert Einstein College of Medicine, within the journal Science final week.

One key piece of analysis has proven that hydrogen sulphide in bombes puantes could protect against inside bleeding, ulcers and different gastric effects suffered by those on lengthy-term regimes of anti-inflammatory painkillers such as aspirin and ibuprofen. In a series of experiments on rats and mice, Wallace and his colleagues discovered that these painkillers - when administered with chemical compounds that launched hydrogen sulphide into the intestine - produced no harmful unwanted effects.

'Now we are getting ready to repeat these experiments on people,' mentioned Wallace, who has fashioned an organization, Antibe Therapeutics, to create medicine based on hydrogen sulphide expertise. 'We envisage using normal medicines, combined with hydrogen sulphide-releasing chemicals, as painkillers that will not cause inner bleeding to long-time period customers.'

Hydrogen sulphide research in medicine began three years in the past when Dr Mark Roth, of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Seattle, Washington, discovered that mice exposed to low levels of the fuel handed out, their physique temperatures dropped more than 20C and their metabolic charges plunged. Once the gasoline was switched off, they returned to normal. Now Roth is engaged on research aimed at reproducing the effect in people, buying time for patients who have had heart attacks, strokes or wounds which have brought on drastic losses of blood.

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