Trained Sniffer Dogs Probably to Detect Coronavirus

At present, many countries are facing a crisis of lack of effective detection during the coronavirus pandemic, and scientists believe that professionally trained medical detection dogs may be the solution to the crisis.

Durham University and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), a joint medical testing dog organization, are studying whether trained dogs can detect coronavirus.

What is the scientific basis for detecting coronavirus with dogs?

Scientists believe that diseases will change the body's operating mode. When diseases cause abnormal biochemical reactions in the body, they may produce small volatile molecules, which can be transported by the blood to the lungs, exhaled from the mouth, or in the urine. And sweat is discharged.

Therefore, many diseases have their own unique smell, and this smell helps us diagnose diseases.
There was once a real case where super olfactory Joey Milne was a person who ate by smell, and she often received invitations and tastings from perfume and wine companies.

However, because of her good sense of smell, she smelled the unique smell of her husband. At first, she didn't care. Until a physical examination 12 years later, she found that her husband had Parkinson's disease.

After communicating with the doctor, it was found that this odor is related to Parkinson's disease, so she cooperated with scientists and participated in the research of disease odor, and finally determined many unique odors related to the disease.

Like Parkinson's disease, it causes the patient's sebum secretion to increase, giving off a musky smell.

Today, scientists have determined that diseases such as cancer, tuberculosis, Alzheimer's disease, and diabetes can be detected by smell.

Dog's sense of smell is several orders of magnitude better than our human sensitivity

From a biological point of view, there are only 5 million olfactory cells in humans, and there are about 20 million dogs. Some breeds are even more. When a dog inhales gas, air will enter the olfactory area and lungs respectively.

Scientists believe that the dog's sense of smell is 10,000 to 100,000 times that of our humans. What does this mean?

If humans can detect the sugar in a cup of coffee, then the same amount of sugar is put in two Olympic-size swimming pool waters, and the dog can still detect it.

It has been reported that the true story about the dog's acute sense of smell is the best example.

An anti-narcotics dog "discovered" a plastic container containing 31 pounds of contraband and was immersed in gasoline in a mailbox; a black labrador from the streets of Seattle, which can be one mile away in Puget Sound Killer whale droppings are found floating on rough water; most importantly, the dog can be a cancer sniffer dog, which can find only a spot-sized melanoma on the patient's skin.

Summary

Based on the above, it is very effective and reliable to use dogs to sniff diseases, but for the virus detection this time, scientists are not very sure.

Smell detection is still at an early stage. It is not clear whether the new coronavirus has a special odor. Given that other respiratory diseases will change our body odor, odor detection is only possible but not necessarily successful.

Six dogs are currently being trained. Training includes putting the patient ’s mask on the dog and letting them sniff to see if there is a unique smell that can be recognized by the dog ’s enhanced sense of smell.
Ultimately, whether the dog can recognize the new coronavirus will require several weeks of experimentation to determine.

Scientists also said that once the project is successful, it is of great significance.

When resources and testing tools are insufficient, hundreds of people cannot test at once, but dogs can sniff 750 people per hour.