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If you are greeted by a sniffing black lab or light greyhound on arrival or at check-in at Helsinki airport, it is not drugs they are sniffing.
This week, Finnish veterinary and health authorities launched a unique pilot project on Finland’s response to Gardermoen to find out if the Labrador Miina, the Kössi monkey and two other dogs with an advanced sense of smell can sniff out passengers with covid infection. -19.
An experiment with Finnish ideas is also being carried out at Dubai airport. The Swedish Dagens Nyheter and the Finnish media write that Chile, Iran, Ethiopia and Jordan are other countries that have contacted about experiences of the Veterinary Institute of the University of Helsinki.
Preparations for the crown project have been going on there for some months.
Guldvog: very exciting
– This is very exciting and we will follow the results from Finland. At the beginning of the crown period, professionals here also came up with ideas that so-called scent dogs can be helpful. There are, for example, interesting experiences with dogs learning to smell cancer cells, health director Bjørn Guldvog tells Dagbladet.
And Kössi, the most crowned dog, is already a celebrity in Finland. The 14-year-old photo ended up with Finnish dog researchers after it was picked up as a stray puppy in Malaga, Spain.
He first learned how to detect cancerous tumors in other dogs, then malignant cancer cells in humans, and finally, among other things, bed bugs and rats.
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Clear your throat
The test at the main Finnish airport Helsinki-Vantaa (Helsinki-Vantaa in Swedish) is voluntary for passengers, who wipe their neck and neck with a napkin or gauze.
The test piece is placed in a box, which the dogs smell inside a cubicle.
The theory is that they should flag for traces of covid-19. A test lasts one minute, maximum two. The idea is that the dogs can smell about 200 samples a day.
The excitement in the next round is whether crown dogs can sniff out COVID-19 on air passenger clothing.
Then some ethical issues need to be clarified first, even for people who fear dogs.
– Sensational blows
Veterinary medicine doctor Anna Hielm-Björkmann has led the pilot project at the University of Finland.
16 dogs have been involved in the lab project in the last six months. And 10 of them have further advanced to field testing.
– The results of the Veterinary Institute have been surprising. There, the dogs sniffed their way to covid-positive samples mixed in urine, alternately with negative samples. There has been a very high hit rate. Perhaps most impressive is that the dogs have sniffed out positive tests that have not immediately resulted in ordinary PCR tests, says the vet about the first test period.
220 million against 5
I’m jingling Canine researchers already know the eminent sense of smell in animals: a dog has 220 million olfactory cells, a human has 5 million.
A great question remains unanswered after the first trial period: – We have not been able to demonstrate what covid-19 has that has had such a great impact on the sense of smell in dogs. That the virus may be chronic is one of several theories, says Dr. Hielm-Björkmann.
Another aspect of which the project manager, on the other hand, is quite certain: – Dogs with an extreme sense of smell are relatively easy to retrain to learn to sniff out new clues. They get exhausted from sniffing the same thing all the time.
