AMAZING! How Dogs Could Sniff COVID In Airports:

By Pamela Glass | Monday, 23 May 2022 08:30 PM
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AMAZING! How Dogs Could Sniff COVID In Airports:

While dogs' ultra-sensitive noses are notorious when it comes to detecting illegal drugs and even cancer, a new study has suggested they may be able to sniff out COVID-19 in airline passengers. Not only that, these trained canines can do so with an accuracy comparable to a PCR nose and throat swab test, the researchers assert.

"Our preliminary observations suggest that dogs primed with one virus type can in a few hours be retrained to detect its variants," Anu Kantele and colleagues reported in the May 16 issue of the journal BMJ Global Health. Kantele is a professor of infectious diseases at Helsinki University Hospital and Faculty of Medicine, Finland.

Dogs are proven to have a superb sense of smell and can detect a scent at levels as low as one part per trillion, far surpassing any available mechanical methods, the authors wrote in background notes. It's believed that dogs can detect specific volatile organic compounds released by various metabolic processes in the body, including those produced by bacterial, viral and parasitic infections.

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In this study, four dogs previously trained to detect illicit drugs, dangerous goods or cancers were trained over a number of weeks to sniff out SARS-CoV-2. The dogs each sniffed skin swab samples from 114 people who had tested positive for the virus on a PCR swab test (including 28 with no symptoms) and from 306 who had tested negative. The two types of COVID tests are PCR and antigen.

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Overall, the dogs were 92% successful in detecting infected people and 91% successful in varifying uninfected people. Of the samples from the 28 infected people without symptoms, the investigators found that the dogs were just over 89% successful at identifying them as positive. The researchers then tested the dogs at the Helsinki-Vantaa International Airport in Finland between September 2020 and April 2021. They instructed the canines to place their noses on incoming passengers who had had PCR tests.

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The dogs correctly identified 296 (99%) of 300 passengers with negative PCR results, but identified three PCR-positive people as negative. According to the study further analysis showed that one of those three people was not infected, one likely had a post-infection positive test result and one had the virus.

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Due to the rate of infection among the airline passengers being significantly low (less than 0.5%), the researchers presented the dogs with swabs from 155 people who had tested positive on a PCR test. The dogs correctly identified just under 99% of them as positive.

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If these samples had been included in real-life airport tests, the dogs would have been 97% successful at detecting infected people and 99% successful at detecting uninfected people, according to Kantele's team. Based on these results, the researchers calculated the rate of true positive results (PPV) and true negative results (NPV) in two hypothetical scenarios with population infection rates of 40% and 1%.

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This new job for dogs could be crucially important in the early stages of a pandemic when other resources might not be available and also to help contain an ongoing pandemic, the team proposed. Notwithstanding, while these findings seem extremely promising, they still need to be confirmed in real-life conditions.

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