One of the biggest challenges to battling the rapid spread of Covid-19 is identifying and isolating people who are infected before the symptoms, which usually take between three to 13 days, surface. Now, frontline workers may get some help from canines who can “sniff out” the disease even when the patient is asymptomatic, meaning he or she never shows any of the traits associated with Covid-19.
Bio-detection dogs are not a new idea. In the past, canines had been successfully trained to detect several deadly diseases long before the patients displayed any symptoms. These include identifying those with stomach cancer by smelling their urine samples in Japan, and those afflicted with malaria from their foot odour in Gambia.
Dogs are the natural animal of choice due to their extremely sensitive noses, which are equipped with 300 million scent sensors. In comparison, humans only have six million scent sensors! Pooches also have a second smell receptor that we do not possess. Located at the bottom of their nasal passage, the vomeronasal, or Jacobson's organ, is powerful enough to smell generally undetectable odors. “We could detect a spoonful of sugar in a cup of tea, but a dog could detect a spoonful of sugar in two Olympic-sized swimming pools,” Professor James Logan, head of the department of disease control at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told The Guardian. “It's that level.”
The key to the enlisting bio-detection dogs lies in finding out if Covid-19 patients emanate a distinct odour. Logan and his team, who have partnered with a non-profit organisation called Medical Detection Dogs for this all-important project, are optimistic, there is. The expert says, “We've had a lot of people contact us, particularly medical workers, people who are in care homes, and people in hospitals who are saying, ‘We can smell it. I can walk into a room, and I can tell there are patients here with Covid-19.’ We've got to take that with a pinch of salt, because that's not scientific proof, but it gives us further hope that it does exist.”
(DoGo News)