Dogs found to be effective for mass screening people for COVID-19

Bob Yirka is a research scientist at Phys.org.

A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in France and one in the United Arabian Emirates have found that dogs are as effective at mass screening people for COVID-19 as publicly available tests. In their paper published on the open-access site, the group describes how they tested multiple dogs to see how well they could smell human sweat.

Dogs can smell cancer when someone is near them, according to prior research. Dogs may be able to do the same thing with COVID-19. The sniffing ability of multiple dogs was tested to see if that is the case.

Multiple dogs were trained to sniff human sweat and to sit down if they detected the COVID-19. It was similar to training dogs to detect explosives. The dogs were taken to the Alfort School of Veterinary Medicine where sweat samples were taken from them.

Sweat samples were collected from 355 people. They were 98% accurate in identifying people who had already tested positive. In people who weren't experiencing any symptoms, they were 100% accurate in detecting Covid-19. The dogs were found to be more accurate in identifying people with COVID-19 than the antigen tests, which are the most common at home.

The researchers note that sweat samples were collected from the back of the neck and from used face masks, showing that samples can be collected from more than one body site. They don't know how dogs can smell infections in people. They say that dogs are much quicker at detecting COVID-19 than humans are at it. The limited availability of trained dogs was the only downside.

More information: Dominique GRANDJEAN et al, Diagnostic accuracy of non-invasive detection of SARS-CoV-2 infection by canine olfaction, PLOS ONE (2022). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0268382 Journal information: PLoS ONE

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