Dogs Can Sniff Out COVID-19 and Signs of Long COVID, Studies Suggest

A dog’s sense of smell is thousands of times stronger than a human’s. Their superior snoots are why canines are used in law enforcement; once they’re trained to detect certain scents, like narcotics and explosives, they can pick up traces that human noses could never notice. The same skill translates to medicine. Research shows that dogs can sniff out evidence of cancer and other diseases with impressive accuracy—and a recent study adds more evidence to suggest the same is true of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] In the study, which was published in the journal PLOS ONE and builds on a smaller one published in 2020, dogs from French fire departments and the UAE’s Ministry of the Interior were trained to recognize the smell of compounds associated with SARS-CoV-2 in human sweat samples. “The welfare of the dogs was fully respected, with toy rewards and a total absence of work-induced physical or mental fatigue,” the authors write. The researchers then collected sweat from the armpits of almost 350 people seeking COVID-19 testing at sites in Paris. About a third of the people tested positive via PCR tests. The dogs’ overall sensitivity (their ability to pick up on positive samples) was 97%, while their overall specificity (their ability to determine that a sample was negative) was 91%. That puts dogs’ diagnostic capabilities in the same league as gold-standard PCR tes...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 healthscienceclimate Source Type: news