Man’s best friend could soon be man’s best chance to step on a stadium again.
Dogs can detect the coronavirus with an astonishing 94 percent accuracy rate, increasing the chance for instant testing at sports events and airports, according to a new study.
Canine handlers trained eight dogs from the German Armed Forces to discern human saliva infected with COVID-19 from healthy saliva, according to the study, which was led by Hannover University of Veterinary Medicine and the Hanover Medical School. .
The researchers then randomly sampled 1,000 people, ordered the dogs to identify those infected, and found that the animals were accurate 94 percent of the time, according to the study.
The puppies were able to make the potentially life-saving distinction because the virus likely “completely changes” the internal chemistry of an infected person, giving their saliva a different scent, said one researcher involved.
“We believe that dogs can detect a specific odor from the metabolic changes that occur in those patients,” Maren von Koeckritz-Blickwede, the university professor who conducted the study, said in a YouTube video about the experiment.
The study raises the hope that dogs can help prevent outbreaks by using rapid tests at sports and airport events and other mass gatherings, the researchers said.
During the study, the dogs were trained for a week before learning to detect the disease with remarkable precision, according to the researchers, who also used samples of “respiratory secretion.” The study doesn’t pinpoint which breed of dogs were trained, but it appears that Labrador retrievers have been involved.
Dogs can smell up to 10,000 times more powerfully and more accurately than humans, and have shown in previous studies that they can detect diseases like malaria and cancer.
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