Now here’s an idea!

Using the dog’s nose to sniff out positive Covid cases!

I follow Tony and I have been across to his blog before One Regular Guy Writing about Food, Exercise and Living Past 100.

But on the 15th February Tony came up with a brilliant idea; read it for yourself:

ooOOoo

Dogs’ highly evolved noses can rapidly detect the SARS-CoV-2 virus

For some 15,000 years, dogs have been our hunting partners, workmates, helpers and companions. Could they also be our next allies in the fight against COVID-19? As a dog owner with a small poodle who could sniff out a chicken bone in the middle of a football field I was not surprised to learn this.

According to UC Santa Barbara professor emeritus Tommy Dickey and his collaborator, BioScent researcher Heather Junqueira, they can. And with a review paper published in the Journal of Osteopathic Medicine they have added to a small but growing consensus that trained medical scent dogs can effectively be used for screening individuals who may be infected with the COVID-19 virus.

I would volunteer my 15-year-old poodle, Gabi, for this study.

This follows a comprehensive survey of research devoted to the use of trained scent dogs for detecting COVID. “The most striking result is that studies have already demonstrated that dogs can identify people who are COVID-19 positive,” Dickey said of their findings. “Not only that,” he added, “they can do it non-intrusively, more rapidly and with comparable or possibly better accuracy than our conventional detection tests.”

Not surprisingly, the magic lies in canine sense of smell, which gives dogs the ability to detect molecules in tiny concentrations — “one part in a quadrillion compared with one part in one billion for humans,” according to the paper. Add to that other optimizations for smell, such as a large nasal area and the structure of their noses, which allows inflow through the nostrils and outflow through nasal folds. Further, with 125-300 million olfactory cells and a third of their brains devoted to interpreting odors, dogs are well equipped with the ability to sniff out the volatile organic compounds that indicate the presence of COVID.

ooOOoo

I must gently disagree with Tony’s opening statement. Dogs evolved from the grey wolf something like 23,000 years ago.

But what a great article and will we see the authorities take him up on the idea? I certainly hope so.

14 thoughts on “Now here’s an idea!”

  3. I may be mistaken, but I think they are training dogs already to detect this scent. I’m sure they will start with airports and go from there. It takes time and lots of money to train dogs to identify an individual scent from all others. They are just brilliant for detecting so many things.

    Like

    Reply

      1. I watch the news after it has been recorded. I put it in fast forward with the sound off. If there is something I need or want to know about, I can stop and listen then continue to bypass the garbage. That’s how I found out about the dogs sniffing out covid. I can’t handle the stress of news so I keep it to a minimum.

        Like

      3. That’s hardcore, Paul!!! Wow! I do understand why though. Most is too dumb for words and we wonder why so many here can’t think. I love science and documentaries unlike many females in my generation. Leaves me on the fringes a lot. 😉

        Like

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.