Dogs Combating COVID-19 By Learning How To Pick Up Its Scent
Man’s best friend just joined the fight against the novel COVID-19 virus.
Medical Detection Dogs, the London School of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene School and the Durham University are training dogs in the hopes they could pick the scent of Coronavirus.
There is “absolutely no reason why a dog can’t detect the virus,” said Dr. Claire Guest, a behavioral psychologist and charity member of Medical Detection Dogs.
“We know that other respiratory diseases like COVID-19, change our body odor so there is a very high chance that dogs will be able to detect it,” said professor James Logan, head of department of disease control at LSHTM. “This new diagnostic tool could revolutionize our response to COVID-19 in the short term, but particularly in the months to come, and could be profoundly impactful.”
Previously, Medical Detection Dogs was successful in teaching dogs to detect, cancer, Parkinson’s disease, and most recently malaria. That action even had a 80% success rate in finding prostate cancer.
With more than a dozen of peer-reviewed papers backing Medical Detection Dogs, its next stop in science is detecting Coronavirus.
“If the research is successful, we could use COVID-19 detection dogs at airports at the end of the epidemic to rapidly identify people carrying the virus,” said Steve Lindsay, at Durham University. “This would help prevent the re-emergence of the disease after we have brought the present epidemic under control.”
