They’ve successfully sniffed out different forms of cancers and sniffed out those affected by malaria for years, but are medical detection dogs the future of COVID 19 testing and detection?
By: Ringp Bones
Three months ago, specifically trained medical detection dogs have shown promising results in being able to detect COVID 19 in suspected patients even before the patients tested positive with existing COVID 19 test procedures, thus establishing their potential for use in new non-invasive, early warning measure to detect coronavirus in the future. After promising results by the world leading researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and collaboration with the charity Medical Detection Dogs and Durham University, dogs that can sniff out COVID 19 will soon be working as an early detection system in a public space near you.
Given that dogs have been successfully sniffing out certain cancers and even malaria infected individuals for a number of years now, COVID 19 detection could represent the new frontier for these medical detection dogs. More than 10 years of research gathered by Medical Detection Dogs has shown that the dogs, which could screen up to 250 people per hour, can be trained to detect the odor of specific diseases at the equivalent dilution of one teaspoon of sugar in 2-Olympic sized swimming pools of water.
Trials in Helsinki, Finland’s airports are already planned to use medical detection dogs to “sniff-out” newly arrived plane passengers for COVID 19. And given the promising results by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine trials of these dogs, the medical detection dogs can also perform mass screenings of COVID 19 at a faster time compared to existing mass testing methods with even better accuracy. This could make the disconcerting cotton swab through the nose testing for COVID 19 a thing of the past.
