TUESDAY, May 17, 2022 (HealthDay News) — Dogs’ ultra-sensitive noses can detect illegal drugs and even cancer, and a new study suggests they may also be able to sniff out COVID-19 in airline passengers.
Not only that, these trained canines can do so with an accuracy comparable to a PCR nose and throat swab test, the researchers noted.
“Our preliminary observations suggest that dogs primed with one virus type can in a few hours be retrained to detect its variants,” Anu Kantele and colleagues reported in the May 16 issue of the journal BMJ Global Health. Kantele is a professor of infectious diseases at Helsinki University Hospital and Faculty of Medicine, Finland.
Dogs have a superb sense of smell. They can detect a scent at levels as low as one part per trillion, far surpassing any available mechanical methods, the authors said in background notes.
It’s believed that dogs can get wind of specific volatile organic compounds released by various metabolic processes in the body, including those produced by bacterial, viral and parasitic infections.
In this study, four dogs previously trained to detect illicit drugs, dangerous goods or cancers were trained over a few weeks to sniff out SARS-CoV-2.