Could Dogs Help Detect COVID-19?
I was out for a walk with Molly the Black Lab and Penny the Great Dane last night here in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. We were making our customary evening walk. Tails were wagging and noses were busy. Dogs, sense and pick up so much more than humans. Tons more! I got me wondering if dogs might be able to help. According to Businessinsider.com parts of the world are working on it now!
There could be a new way to spot the coronavirus — sniffer dogs.
In the UK, dogs trained by a charity called Medical Detection Dogs are experts at recognizing diseases like cancer, malaria and Parkinson's by their scent, according to the BBC.
Their next target is the coronavirus, and if successful they could be a valuable tool identifying carriers at busy areas like airports.
Like anything, it will take time. But turns out in the UK, they're working on it. Training dogs to detect. How awesome would that be! Especially if dogs could detect COVID-19 among those asymptomatic carriers?
I remember being intrigued by the discovery of Penicillin. Wikipedia says;
The effects of penicillium mold were finally isolated in 1928 by Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming, in work that seems to have been independent of those earlier observations. Fleming recounted that the date of his discovery of penicillin was on the morning of Friday 28 September 1928.
It's my hope they make some important discoveries fast. And I can't help wondering if something a simple as a dog's nose, could lead to a faster diagnosis.
In another article, The Akron Beacon Journal wrote an interesting story. Author,Bob Dyer wrote;
Gary Broberg knows dogs. And he believes there’s no reason dogs could not be trained to detect whether a person has COVID-19.
A resident of Berea, Broberg has worked with the Federal Emergency Management Agency Task Force. He trains scent-detecting dogs, and has used them to locate dead bodies in both Northeast Ohio and after national tragedies such as the Oklahoma City bombing and the 1994 US Air crash near Pittsburgh that killed 132.
Broberg says detection teams could be set up within three weeks.
Check out the rest of the story here. My favorite line from the story?
The swab would be put in a canister and the driver would wait nearby while the dog reacts or doesn’t. If an alert was indicated, a second dog would be used to confirm.
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