For me it's like cheese cake. It is creamy, sweet, doesn't taste like anything you've had before. The durian has been used to successfully cure cases of malaria. Different folk healers with whom I closely worked beat the ripe durian flesh to a juicy pulp and had their patients afflicted with malaria drink this stuff in adequate quantities. I never knew them to fail curing cases of malaria, even when regular prescription drugs failed to eradicate the problem.
Intestinal parasites are another problem plaguing many of the countries in the South China Sea.
Again, the durian fruit is employed for the specific purpose of eliminating them from the gastrointestinal tract. When some people think about durian, they think about what they think to be its highly offensive smell. Many seem to agree that the smell is really bad. Indonesians acknowledge that prolonged exposure to the smell may have negative effects, and the carriage of durians on public transports is forbidden. Now the first time I had it, after reading all those scary descriptions, I expected a really bad smell.