Some schools in the United States of America are set to receive two dogs that have been trained to detect an odor from people who have contracted and are sick with the Covid-19.
The two dogs are to visit three school districts in Bristol County, in Massachusetts, a state in the US this week. The dogs were trained using a detection program developed by Florida International University’s International Forensic Research Institute.
According to reports, a black Labrador named Huntah and a golden Lab called Duke could discover the smell of Covid-19 on surfaces and will sit to indicate when they pick up the scent.
The dogs are reported to visit schools in the Freetown, Lakeville, and Norton school districts.
Bristol County Captain, Paul Douglas said: “With Covid-19, whether it’s the omicron, whether it’s the delta, our dogs will hit on it. If there’s a new variant that comes out in six months, hopefully, there isn’t, but if there is one, Covid is Covid”.
Fairhaven School Superintendent, Tara Kohler welcomed the dogs saying their presence displays that every measure is being taken to mitigate the risk of students and teachers contracting the disease.
More Coronavirus-Sniffing Dogs are being Trained
Per research conducted, Scientists have long known that people sick with certain diseases emit particular odors, different infections affect different parts of the body in different ways, often producing specific combinations of volatile compounds. According to the same research, dogs have shown a remarkable ability to pick up on those airborne chemicals, detecting when people are infected with malaria, infectious bacteria, and even certain types of cancer. Now scientists are hoping that dogs’ keen sense of smell, 10,000 times better than that of humans, can help them identify people carrying Covid-19.
Steve Lindsay, a public health entomologist at Durham University, along with collaborators at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and the U.K.-based nonprofit Medical Detection Dogs, is working on a U.K. government-funded study that will test dogs’ ability to detect Covid-19. Their goal is to train coronavirus-sniffing dogs, which would later be deployed to schools, airports, and other public venues to reinforce existing nasal swab testing programs. A similar study is underway at the University of Pennsylvania.
James Logan, the head of LSHTM’s Department of Disease Control and the project lead on the U.K. study said: “We’re not just doing the proof-of-concept work, we’re also working out actively how to deploy this and scale it up as well because we want to hit the ground running once, we’ve gotten our results”.
Other studies have produced promising, though early, results. In June, a team in France using a small number of samples collected from human patients who had been tested for COVID-19 in PCR tests found a high degree of evidence that dogs could detect COVID-19 infections through differences in the smell of human subjects’ armpit sweat.
In Germany, researchers ran a small pilot study, with trained coronavirus-sniffing dogs and showed that the dogs were able to distinguish between coronavirus-positive samples and a control group with an average sensitivity of 83% and a specificity of 96% after only one week of training. According to reports, that’s not quite as accurate as COVID-19 rapid antigen tests, which have a sensitivity ranging from 84% to nearly 98% and specificities of 100%. However, antigen tests require often uncomfortable nasal swabs and take about 15 minutes to return results. Dogs, by contrast, may be able to tell if a person is infected in seconds, no swab is needed.
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