In .profile, why is alias not working?

Recently (since upgrading to Mavericks??), several alias commands in ~/.profile are not working after I start Terminal (although numerous path settings set up there are working as expected). For example, ~/.profile includes:

alias mysqlctl='sudo /usr/local/mysql/support-files/mysql.server'

alias mysqlstart='mysqlctl start'

But after I start Terminal and execute

mysqlstart

I get error:

bash: mysqlstart: command not found

I know that something peculiar is going on because when I attempt to exit the (one and only) running Terminal session with command exit I just see an echoed response

exit

but can quit Terminal by executing the same exit command again.

Moreover, if in Terminal I execute

source ~/.profile

then the aliases work as expected.

I did try the ruse I found somwhere of including before any of the other alias lines in .profile the command alias sudo='sudo ' but that doesn't fix the problem.

I thought perhaps some other startup file is being read and hence commands in ~/.profile are therefore not being executed, but I find no such: I have no

~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_profile or ~/.login file. (And Terminal is set to use the default login shell, which is bash.

What could be wrong and how can it be fixed?