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Dogs have odor receptors up to 10,000 times more resistant and accurate than humans. This some dogs trained to trip into diseases such as cancer, malaria and viral infections.
Now, for German researchers, trained dogs may stumble upon coronavirus infections.
A new study, conducted through hanover University of Veterinary Medicine, the Hanover Medical School and the German Armed Forces, found that, although well trained, dogs could distinguish between inflamed human saliva samples with SARS-CoV-2 and non-inflamed samples. with a 94% overall good fortune rate.
The hope is that this detection approach can one day be used in public spaces such as airports, sporting events and other mass gatherings (in addition to laboratory tests) to prevent long-term Covid-19 outbreaks, according to the researchers.
To conduct the study, the researchers trained 8 dogs from the German armed forces for a week. Trained dogs sniffed the saliva of more than 1,000 healthy or inflamed people. The samples inflamed with Covid-19 were randomly distributed and neither dog caregivers nor researchers knew which ones were positive.
In a YouTube video about the project, Maren von Koeckritz-Blickwede, a professor at the university who led the study, says dogs are able to do so because the metabolic processes of an inflamed user “change completely”.
“We believe that dogs should stumble upon an express smell of the metabolic adjustments that occur in these patients,” he says.
Although more is needed, Von Koeckritz-Blickwede says the next step is to exercise dogs to differentiate Covid-19 samples from other diseases such as influenza.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, although dogs may become inflamed with Covid-19, there is no evidence that animals play a role in the spread of the virus.
The study was published in BMC Infectious Diseases on July 23.
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