A short comment about the "death odor" precedes the crime scene cleanup comments found here.

You might be interested to know that many people call the death odor "miasma." This term goes back to the 17th century when the death odor was associated with disease. Many educated people taught that miasma was itself carried plagues. We know today that miasma is just as safe as any other odor. It simply offends our sense of taste. We might ask, "Were we born with a distaste for this odor?". "Do Instincts account for our repulsed behavior to this odor?" we might also ask.

Both answers to the above questions are no and no! Just like any other odor, we must learn to dislike miasma's various fragrances. Everyday around the world tens of thousands of people work with these odors and remain healthy. In short, we learn to "hate" the odor of death moreso because of what it means to us than what it does to us.

Crime Scene Odors

The odors associated with a crime scene consist of both organic and inorganic substances. The inorganic are the materials used in the crime, such as the odor of gun powder. For our purposes here, our concern is the organic substances that lead to strong, repulsive contamination of a structure's internal environment.

Blood and other potentially infectious materials (OPIM) begin decomposing once released from the body. The rate of decomposition depends upon the external environment's temperature, relative humidity, and other conditions. Along with decomposition follows odor. Both blood and OPIM

Blood's contents add to its odor causing properties once in its external environment, open air.

Protiens, carbohydrates, oxygen, carbon dioxide, urine, feces, enzymes, oils, and more add to its mal-odor properties. The detection of blood's odor depends upon the perceivers' previous experience with this odor as well as their strength of odor detection. Among any group of people, one will have a greater ability to detect blood's presence than the others, and so on. It is a relative matter.

Violent deaths usually involve a great loss of blood and tissue, OPIM (Other Potentially Infectious Materials). The loss of blood and tissue, the environmental conditions, and other circumstances will aid in the production of offensive death scene odors, miasma.

Sometimes miasma lingers because of poor ventilation, Sometimes miasma will linger because it has permeated porous materials: fabrics, paper, wood, and more.

We do our best to remove the odors associated with crime scenes and other death scenes. However, removing the source material will not always return the scene to its pre-incident condition for some time. Time and heavy ventilation, and removal of miasma permeated materials will help return the scene to a more "normal" condition.