Dogs Are Trained To Sniff Out Coronavirus In Pennsylvania And UK

Health experts say if the training project is successful, people will soon see life-saving pooches at airports, hospitals, and businesses sniffing out the deadly pathogen and preventing it from spreading. University of Pennsylvania and London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine researchers said that this could revolutionize the response of humanity to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Canines Could Identify Malaria Infections

In an interview with the Washington Post, Dr. James Logan said dogs have a keen sense of smell and have been known to detect subtle changes in the skin’s temperature. This means canines could potentially tell if a person has a fever. Dr. Logan is the head of the London university’s disease control department.

Researchers at the university had demonstrated in the past that dogs could detect malaria infections in humans. They now hope to provide dogs with similar training that would enable them to detect COVID-19 infections. After training, they plan to deploy six coronavirus-sniffing canines at UK airports.

Screens Hundreds Of People Per Hour

According to Dr. Logan, each dutiful dogs can screen up to 250 individuals per hour. “We are simultaneously working on a model to scale it up so it can be deployed in other countries at ports of entry, including airports,” Dr. Logan said.

Back in the US, eight Labrador retrievers started training this month at the University of Pennsylvania. Washington Post reported that the pups are being trained to identify a particular odor for a food reward. After this learning phase, they will then be trained to sniff out coronavirus using saliva and urine samples collected from patients who tested negative and positive for COVID-19.

Not The Odor But Something Different

According to Dr. Cynthia Otto, they do not know if the virus causes a particular odor to be emitted or whether dogs will respond to such odor. Dr. Otto said, however, that dogs actually will not care what the odor will be. What they are trained to learn is, “…that there’s something different about this sample than there is about that sample.” Dr. Otto is the director of the Working Dog Center at UPenn’s School of Veterinary Medicine.

In an interview with the Washington Post, the final and hardest phase of the training will be teaching the dogs to sniff out coronavirus in a human. “That’s going to be the next proof of concept: Can we train them to identify it when a person has it and that person’s moving?” said Dr. Otto.