Man’s best friend can help detect coronavirus
The ongoing pandemic has put people around the world in a very stressful situation. Man’s best friend is once again proving that they are always ready to help humans no matter how problematic the situation is.
According to a study conducted by University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover, after going through training for only a few days, dogs are able to identify individuals infected with coronavirus. Since the start of the pandemic the health care experts in charge have been saying that testing is the key to help ensure the flattening of the curve. However, the testing kits availability and cost is something that not every country is capable of managing. Therefore, finding alternative ways of getting maximum tests done is something that is a welcome addition to dealing with this ongoing health crisis.
The study used eight dogs from Germany’s armed forces and trained them over a period of one week and after that they were able to identify the virus with the success rate of 94 per cent, during the pilot project. Researchers challenged the dogs to sniff out Covid-19 in the saliva of more than 1,000 healthy and infected people.
“We think that this works because the metabolic processes in the body of a diseased patient are completely changed,” Maren Von Koeckritz-Blickwede, a professor at the university, said in a YouTube video about the project. “We think that the dogs are able to detect a specific smell.”
Dogs sense of smell is around a thousand times more sensitive than humans. There have been experiments that have used this sensitive sense of smell to detect cancer as well. Now this natural gift can be deployed to detect infections at public places, especially at airports, border crossings and public events.
The study was conducted jointly with the German armed forces, the Hannover Medical School and the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf. Von Koeckritz-Blickwede said that the next step will be to train dogs to differentiate covid samples from other diseases like influenza.
Originally published at https://pk.mashable.com on July 27, 2020.
