The team of 11 "professional noses" in the Pearl River delta have been trained by air pollution experts, China Daily quoted a senior official at the station as saying on Wednesday.
"Now we can differentiate between hundreds of smells that may make people ill, before making an assessment on their density," vice-director Liu Jingcai was reported as saying.
"The work is quite unpleasant. We have to stay in a lab smelling those awful gases repeatedly," he added.
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