U.S. RESEARCHERS ARE TRAINING DOGS TO SNIFF OUT COVID-19
Source: ctvnews.ca (Extract)
Posted: May 7, 2020
TORONTO — As businesses in the United States slowly begin reopening, researchers in Pennsylvania are turning to dogs to help them fend off a second wave of COVID-19.
A pilot program at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Veterinary Medicine is training scent-detecting dogs to notice differences between the saliva and urine of people who are COVID-19 positive versus those who are COVID-19 negative.
In a news release, the school said the project could begin preliminary screening of live humans as early as July.
“I think this is the best thing that we can hope for and I think hope is what we need,” Dr. Cynthia Otto, director of Penn Vet’s Working Dog Center, told CTV News.
Researchers will begin the study with eight dogs, who will be exposed to the saliva and urine samples of COVID-19 positive patients over the course of three weeks. Afterwards, they will begin testing to see if the dogs can discriminate between COVID-19 positive and COVID-19 negative samples.
“All of those samples will have the virus inactivated, so we’re going to treat those samples so we still hold onto the odours, but we don’t have any active virus,” Otto said.
While not meant to replace traditional testing methods, COVID-19-detecting dogs have the potential to help with scoping out asymptomatic carriers of the virus and can help in places where mass testing is difficult, such as airports and businesses.
These dogs could also help ease some of the concerns people might have with visiting places with large crowds.
The idea isn’t completely new. Medical Detection Dogs in the United Kingdom is also testing dogs’ ability to sniff out the virus, following the organization’s previous research with malaria-detecting dogs.
Dogs have 300 million smell receptors in their noses, making their sense of smell about 50 times more powerful than that of humans. It’s for this reason that they’ve been trained to sniff out bombs, drugs, track down missing people and even detect early stages of some cancers.
“I think of dogs as seeing through their noses or smelling in colour and it really gives them a perspective that we can’t even begin to understand,” Otto said.