According to new research, dogs can be trained within weeks to detect COVID-19 infection, with the same level of accuracy as a nose-and-throat test.
Four dogs were trained to sniff out the virus in the spring of 2020 as part of a study led by the University of Helsinki in Finland.
The animals, previously trained to detect drugs, dangerous goods or cancer, sniffed skin samples from 114 people who tested positive for the virus and from 306 who tested positive. negative test result.
Research shows they can detect viruses with 92% accuracy.
The dogs also took part in an experiment where they sniffing samples of 303 arriving passengers at Helsinki-Vantaa International Airport from September 2020 to April 2021.
They correctly identified negative samples in 296 out of 300 negative tests, and identified three positives as negative.
It’s one of a number of studies looking at dogs’ ability to detect COVID-19 – a clinic in Germany has dogs trained to detect viruses in human salivawhile a study in Thailand trained dogs to detect a volatile organic compound secreted in the sweat of the infected person.
Scientists have said that using dogs to sniff out viruses could be especially valuable in the early stages of the pandemic when other options are not available.
But they can also help stave off an existing pandemic.
Writing in BMJ Global Health, the researchers suggest that “dogs could be used even in locations with high rates of Sars-CoV-2 infection, such as hospitals (for pre-screening patients and staff). staff), as well as in locations with low incidence, such as airports or ports (for pre-passenger screening)”.
However, the dogs were less successful at identifying the alpha variant, as they had been trained to detect the wild type.
“This observation is remarkable because it demonstrates the powerful discriminatory power of scent dogs,” the researchers said.
“The obvious implication is that the training samples must include all the epidemiologically relevant variants.
“Our initial observations suggest that dogs injected with a virus can be retrained within hours to detect its variants.”
