Saanvi Ganesh discusses a study by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and ARCTEC.
Dogs have an amazing ability to detect minute changes in odour due to 300 million olfactory receptors in a dogs nose (humans have around 6 million), and a part of their brain that is devoted to analysing smells that is around forty times greater than a human's.
People have already put the dogs'
talent and their loyal, easily train-able personalities to good use for
detecting things like drugs and explosives at airports with high accuracy. A
study published in 2019 by The Lancet Infectious Diseases found that dogs could
be used to detect the prevalence of malaria in individuals. Research has shown
that people infected with malaria, whether symptomatic or not, produce a
volatile organic compound or VOC (body odour) that mosquitoes detect and are
attracted to feed on that person.
The results of the study was consistent with its hypothesis that dogs can distinguish between the smell of malaria infected individuals and uninfected ones. The results were calculated to be around 82% accurate, above the World Health Organisation's required threshold for detection tests and importantly dogs can detect the disease in asymptomatic patients.
Dogs have also been proven to be
able to detect respiratory diseases such as lung cancer through VOCs emitted
from patients. It is now hypothesised that the dogs will also be able to detect
COVID-19 VOCs. The research involves training six dogs to distinguish between
positive and negative VOC samples and deploying the dogs within 8-10 week after
training.
This study could have a profound
impact on the return to normality; increased accurate testing impacts
significantly on lowering the number of COVID cases, as done in Germany during
the first wave of COVID. A non-invasive test would also mean a more comfortable
experience of being tested, I'm sure we have all either heard the unpleasant
stories of getting tested for the disease or experienced it ourselves. There
would also be no self-isolation while waiting for results of the test to arrive
as results would be immediate, reducing the impact on mental health greatly due
to no stress of waiting.
Trained dogs could also be able
to screen thousands of travellers at airports, identifying individuals who may
be required to self-isolate, allowing for further re-opening of the UK's borders
to travel either for work or tourism. Dogs could also be able to screen people
visiting places like theatres, cinemas, stadiums and other venues, helping the
entertainment sector greatly and reducing unemployment. An Approach like this
could also be implemented worldwide, allowing the return to some normalcy.
But could the dogs get COVID-19
from being trained and exposed to so much of the virus? According to the
government's statement, there is no evidence that the disease can be passed
from pets and humans, however there have been reports of animals catching the
virus from humans around the world. There have been four reported cases of dogs
catching the virus between the 21st of March and the 28th of October 2020,
according to the WHO for Animal Health.
However, this is a very low case
rate considering the 49 Million human infections that dogs around the world are
exposed to. So we could be seeing sniffer dogs at airports and other venues in
the future as a mechanism of testing.
https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/research/centres-projects-groups/using-dogs-to-detect-covid-19#welcome
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