You may have heard some stories from your family or friends about a few curious canines who are able to sniff the feared SARS-CoV-2 virus. So, what’s the deal? Can they?
Well, the answer is a complicated yes. Around the world, dogs are being trained to detect the very whiff of COVID-19 infections, with surprisingly extraordinary accuracy. Some dog trainers are contracting their canines to control the pandemic to screen hundreds of people an hour at busy airports and stadiums, as a few furry friends are much cheaper to employ for a full day than conventional testing methods such as the RNA-amplification PCR technique.
Unfortunately, most of the data surrounding their involvement have not yet been peer reviewed or published in the scientific community, so it is hard to determine whether this is a scientifically sound method of COVID-19 screening. Scientists have shown some efficacy with a small number of dogs, but there are concerns as to whether this training process can be scaled up.
One pilot study published in BMC Infectious Diseases on July 20th, 2020 sought to highlight the novel nature of this phenomenon. Eight dogs were trained using samples taken directly from the throats and mouths of COVID19 -positive individuals. When the dogs were faced with a daunting 1012 randomized samples, they were able to sniff out the correct answer (either positive or negative) an astounding 94% of the time!
It is so accurate in theory that countries such as France, Lebanon, Germany, Australia, Belgium, Finland and Russia are putting them to work already. Fortunately for the dogs, there is a relatively low risk of animals being infected by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and thus present a minimal risk of spreading the infection to other people.
Now what gives dogs this wonderous superior sense of smell? Their sensitive snouts have over 300 million scent receptors! That’s around 60 times the number of olfactory receptors that humans have. These types of dogs are already seen in military and police forces around the world to detect the presence of drugs, perhaps these newly trained COVID-sniffers will be their healthcare cousins. We don’t exactly know for sure what these dogs are smelling, but researchers believe that illnesses such as COVID-19 causes the body to let off a unique sequence of volatile organic compounds that easily evaporate and allow dogs to pick up their scent.
So, you might be wondering, “does that mean your dog can tell if you get sick?” There’s good news and bad news with this question so we will give you the bad news first: Sorry. Your dog, while they are incredible sniffers, doesn’t have the proper training or exposure to SARS-CoV-2 samples to be able to act as one of these healthcare workers. The good news though, is that your beloved dog won’t be overly worried for your health when you cough at home.
