How we might harness animals’ ability to smell human illnesses — including COVID
Humans have long taken advantage of dogs’ superior sense of smell. The 300 million scent receptors in a dog’s nose are routinely used to detect bombs, drugs, firearms and people. But dogs are now being used experimentally to sniff out human disease.
The field got a huge boost in 2004, when a UK charity called Medical Detection Dogs reported that the animals could sniff out bladder cancer in people’s urine We are now working with chemists at Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia to break up disease-related odours into constituent parts. After all, we know from explosives detection work that not all dogs respond to the exact same parts of an odour. Some use chemicals A and B, whereas others use A and C — whatever is the easiest difference for that particular animal to pick up.Training is similar to how we teach dogs to detect bombs and drugs.
We have been advocating for training and quality-control standards to ensure that the dogs are absolutely doing what we think they are doing — we don’t want people to be misled by human error.Credit: Jennifer L. EsslerAt the beginning of the pandemic, we felt like we needed to do something, so we began to train dogs to detect samples from people with COVID-19.
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