Dog scent as an alternative to testing?
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director General of WHO, chanted it like a mantra “Test, test, test. Every suspected case of coronavirus infection must be tested. »
A principle that seems simple to implement but which is not necessarily so given the scale of the pandemic. Testing massively implies having the resources, human and material, to do it
It is precisely in this context that the association Medical Detection Dogs, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the University of Durham had an idea that could well help to quickly identify, massively and inexpensively, people carrying covid-19 and (perhaps) without having to resort to “classic” tests.
Their idea is to use the flair of dogs trained to detect and report the presence of the virus in samples so that they can then be deployed in strategic places such as airports, at the end of confinement. The dogs would thus be able to quickly identify people carrying the virus in order to prevent the occurrence of other waves of contamination at the end of the epidemic which is currently raging.
After all, several research programs have faith in our dogs' legendary sense of smell to detect diseases such as breast, lung, skin and prostate cancers at very early stages or else malaria again. This time again, the most developed sense of our canines could just as well help us to stem the epidemic of covid-19.
The project will take place in several phases. The first stage will consist of first training 6 bio-detection dogs in 6 to 8 weeks before training a larger number of animals during the second phase of the project.
A safe job for dogs
Of course, the safety of the animals used for this detection work is at the heart of the concerns of the Medical Detection Dogs association. And, although in light of the information currently available, there is no evidence that dogs can contract the disease, the association nevertheless anticipates that "dogs will be trained with non-infectious samples and will not need 'get in touch with the individuals they screen' so as not to take any risks.
Reliable detection?
If the flair of our faithful companions today offers us a new ray of hope, we must always keep in mind that medical detection by animals is still a very recent field and whose results , although promising, are still under investigation.
There is no guarantee to date that the olfactory tests carried out by dogs will have diagnostic value and that they should not be confirmed by other, more conventional tests. To be continued, therefore!