A fresh research indicates that trained medical scent dogs can detect Covid-19 infections more rapidly and accurately. “The most striking result is that studies have already demonstrated that dogs can identify people who are Covid-19 positive. Not only that, they can do it non-intrusively, more rapidly and with comparable or possibly better accuracy than our conventional detection tests,” researcher Tommy Dickey from the University of California, Santa Barbara in the US, told a portal.
“One dog twice indicated positive results that could not be confirmed. Two weeks later they found that both people who gave those samples had to be hospitalised with Covid-19,” Dickey further said.
The secret lies in the canine sense of smell, which gives them the ability to detect molecules in tiny concentrations. As per the paper published in the Journal of Osteopathic Medicine—“one part in a quadrillion compared with one part in one billion for humans.”
The study revealed that while the virus itself has no odour, those infected excrete metabolic products through their sweat glands. The researches got 18 dogs to detect the virus, and they did so with an accuracy of 83-100 per cent after only four days of training.
*All pictures are for representational purposes only.