Dogs are being enlisted
in the fight against the novel coronavirus. Researchers at the
University of Pennsylvania are testing a pack of eight
Labrador retrievers to find out if their sensitive snouts can
detect the pandemic virus by scent, Karin Brulliard reports
for the Washington
Post.
Humans have trained our
canine friends' finely tuned noses to sniff out other deadly
diseases, including malaria, diabetes, some cancers and
Parkinson’s disease, reported Ian Tucker for the Guardian
in 2018. Other research has shown that viruses
give off a particular smell, Cynthia
Otto, director of the Working Dog Center at UPenn’s
School of Veterinary Medicine, tells the Post.
If the dogs’ 300
million scent receptors can be trained to smell the novel
coronavirus they could eventually be used in public places
such as airports, businesses or hospitals to quickly and
easily screen large numbers of people. Because this diagnosis
by dog would depend on the smell given off by people infected
with COVID-19 it should have no problem picking out
asymptomatic carriers.
The yellow, black and
chocolate labs will be trained for three weeks using a process
called odor imprinting. Miss M., Poncho and six other dogs
will be exposed to COVID-19 positive saliva or urine collected
from hospitals and then rewarded with food when they pick out
the correct samples, according to a statement
from UPenn. When the dogs have the scent, they’ll be tested
to see if they can pick out COVID-19 positive people.
“We don’t know
that this will be the odor of the virus, per se, or the
response to the virus, or a combination,” Otto, who is
leading the project, tells the Post. “But the
dogs don’t care what the odor is. … What they learn is
that there’s something different about this sample than
there is about that sample.”
Dogs are also being
trained for this purpose in the United Kingdom by the
charity Medical Detection Dogs in collaboration with Durham
University and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical
Medicine, reports the BBC.
"This would help
prevent the re-emergence of the disease after we have brought
the present epidemic under control," Steve Lindsay,
public health entomologist at Durham University, tells the
BBC.
The U.K. trial expects
to start collecting COVID-19 positive samples in the coming
weeks and will train its dogs shortly thereafter, per the Post.
If the trial is successful the group aims to distribute six
dogs to be used for screening in U.K. airports.
“Each individual dog
can screen up to 250 people per hour,” James Logan,
epidemiologist at Durham University and collaborator on the
project, tells the Post. “We are simultaneously
working on a model to scale it up so it can be deployed in
other countries at ports of entry, including airports.”
Otto tells the Post
that the trial could inspire an electronic sensor that could
detect COVID-19 which might be able to rapidly test thousands
of people. But if the dogs’ olfactory prowess can’t be
replicated, then the ability to scale up could be limited by
another issue: the U.S.’s
shortage of detection dogs.
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From
a humanistic viewpoint, the most important event of the 20th Century
would be the splitting of the atom and the advent of atomic weapons.
But, if we shift to a much more important spiritual viewpoint, then I
would argue that there was an event in the 20th Century that was far
more important than the development of nuclear weapons.
