Dogs are Being Trained to Detect Coronavirus by Scent

Dogs are being trained to detect coronavirus by scent

               Dogs have incredible noses. Their acute sense of smell allows them to perform search and rescue missions, detect drugs or explosives and track birds or other prey for their hunting companions.  Just how good are those noses?  Humans have about six million olfactory sensors.  Dogs?  Try 300 million.  A dog’s brain and the structure of their nasal passages also contribute to their amazing odor detecting abilities.  A dog can detect an odor in parts per trillion.  Researcher Alexandra Horowitz makes the analogy that we might notice if our coffee has had a teaspoon of sugar added to it while a dog could detect a teaspoon of sugar in a million gallons of water (from PBS NOVA’s article “Dogs’ Dazzling Sense of Smell).

               Dogs have also been trained to detect medical conditions in people such as seizures, diabetes and even cancer.  They accomplish this by detecting minute chemical scent changes that are present in a person’s breath, saliva, blood or urine depending on the condition. 

               The University of Pennsylvania is currently studying dogs to see if they can be trained to detect coronavirus infection in people.  Veterinarian Cynthia Otto is training eight dogs to detect the chemical scent (volatile organic compounds or VOCs) found in COVID-19 positive saliva and urine samples.  Once they learn the scent, they will be exposed to positive and negative samples to determine if they can distinguish between the two.  If the dogs can tell the difference between positive and negative biologic samples, they may be able to detect the scent in live subjects.  This could have important implications if dogs are able to pick out asymptomatic carriers of COVID-19 or they may be used to screen people for coronavirus in hospital or business settings.  Screening of human subjects by virus-sniffing dogs could begin as early as July.  Dr. Otto leads a team of other doctors and researchers from the School of Medicine, the School of Arts and Sciences, and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in this important study. 

               Dogs have long been human companions and we cherish the human-animal bond we hold with our canine companions.  It’s so important to take your pets to the vet to keep them healthy.  Dogs may now play a more important role in keeping us healthy with their amazing ability to use their sense of smell to detect disease. 

               This blog brought to you by the Patton Veterinary Hospital serving Red Lion, York and the surrounding communities.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/dogs-sense-of-smell/

https://www.americanveterinarian.com/news/cancersniffing-dogs-where-are-we-today

https://www.vet.upenn.edu/about/press-room/press-releases/article/penn-vet-launches-covid-19-canine-scent-detection-study