Dogs Have Been Successfully Trained to Sniff Out COVID

Man’s best friend has a dazzling sense of smell. Dogs are reputable odor connoisseurs with up to 300 million smell receptors in their schnozzes (compared to a paltry five to six million in humans) and 40 percent more brain space devoted to analyzing smells. Fido can pick up the faintest whiffs of any odor better than any man-made instrument. It’s a super-canine ability we’ve been using to help find missing people (paging Lassie), locate illegal drugs and dangerous compounds like explosives, and catch smuggled contraband. And now we’re using it to root out COVID-19.

In a new study published Monday in the British Medical Journal, a group of Finnish researchers found that dogs trained to sniff out coronavirus could detect it among airport travelers with nearly 100 percent accuracy, raising hopes that our furry friends could provide fast and effective detection of COVID infections not only in crowded public spaces or travel hubs—places considered at a higher risk for virus transmission—but also hospitals and even schools.

“This is a very important study demonstrating that COVID-19 detector dogs can achieve greater than 90 percent accuracy and sensitivity which is comparable to current testing methods but much faster,” Kenneth Furton, a biochemist at Florida International University who was not involved in the study but has previously studied using dogs to detect COVID infections, told The Daily Beast in an email. “COVID-19 detector dogs provide results in seconds rather than minutes or hours and thus can provide screening of large numbers of people without delaying them.”

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