Dogs Can Potentially Smell Covid-19 With High Accuracy
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The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) is collaborating with Medical Detection Dogs and Durham University to see if dogs can learn how to detect patients infected with Covid-19, even if they are asymptomatic.
Professor James Logan, Head of the Department of Disease Control at LSHTM, reported that previous research shows medical detection dogs being able to detect odours from humans infected with malaria with extremely high accuracy- above the required World Health Organizations standards for a diagnostic.
This doesn’t mean that malaria or Covid-19 has a certain “smell”. Similar respiratory diseases change our body odour subtly, which can be detected by trained dogs. So if Covid-19 works the same way and changes the body odour of infected individuals, then it’s highly likely that the medical detection dogs can be trained to sniff them out.
Covid-19 detection dogs will be trained by sniffing samples in the training room and indicating which contains the disease or infection- similar to how dogs are trained for cancer, Parkinson’s, or bacterial infections.
The theory should work in principle. However, Dr Claire Guest, CEO and Co-founder of Medical Detection Dogs, says the main concern now is actually how to safely contain the odour of the virus from patients and present it to the dogs.
If the dogs are trained successfully to sniff out Covid-19, then they can be deployed at ports of entry or other public spaces to identify individuals with the infection, even if they are asymptomatic, saving on testing kits and test delays. The trained dogs will be a fast, effective, and non-invasive method for mass testing while the limited NHS testing resources can be saved for where they are really needed.
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