Dogs have been trained to sniff drugs, bombs, and even cancer. A new study also finds out that they can detect COVID-19 just by smelling skin swabs.
A study that was published last week in which researchers in Finland trained four sniffer dogs to detect whether or not a person had COVID-19, and found that the dogs were 92 percent accurate.
They took the study to a real-world setting where they can identify passengers that are negative to COVID correctly.
“Scent dogs can provide an invaluable tool for limiting viral spread during a pandemic, serving for example at air and seaports,” Anu Kantele, professor of infectious diseases and chief physician at the University of Helsinki and Helsinki University Hospital, said in a press release.
“Such a reliable, cheap approach to rapidly screen a vast number of samples or to identify passing virus carriers from a large crowd is of value particularly when the testing capacity with traditional approaches is insufficient.”
Since the start of the pandemic, numerous researchers and organizations have theorized that dogs might be able to assist in identifying COVID-19 cases fast by utilizing their superior sense of smell.
Several institutions even began to train dogs to identify the scent of the virus. But few studies have tested this ability in a real-world setting.
Researchers first trained a set of dogs to identify samples of COVID-19, then test their skills in a laboratory setting before finally presenting them with the final test: bringing the dogs to an airport to screen passengers.
The four dogs trained for this study — three Labrador retrievers named Silja, Rele, and Kosti, and one white Shepherd named E.T. — all had previous experience with scent work.
They were trained using samples provided by inpatients and outpatients who had been recruited from Helsinki University Hospital.
A skin sample meant a strip of gauze that volunteers had swabbed on their neck, throat area, forehead, and wrists.
To indicate a positive patient, the dogs would show their handler a signal that had been decided upon during the training.
Between September 2020 and the end of April 2021, more than 10,000 travelers and airport employees took part in the experiment, 48 of which were judged to be positive for COVID-19 by the dogs.
Out of this large sample size, 303 travelers or airport employees agreed to take part in the validation portion of the experiment and take a PCR test as well as provide a skin swab for the dogs to sniff.
Using the data from the 303 people, the dogs were found to be 98.7 percent accurate in identifying whether a sample was negative for COVID-19.
“Our research group will continue to study how scent dogs can best help our society. We hope that this newly published study will help to allocate funds for the development of this new ‘tool’,” Anna Hielm-Björkman, leader of the DogRisk research group and one of the authors of the study, said in the release. “There are many other diseases where research could benefit from the excellent sense of smell that these dogs possess.”