Amazon is developing cancer vaccines in collaboration with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and it recently launched an FDA-approved clinical trial. From a report: Amazon and Fred Hutchinson are looking to recruit 20 participants over the age of 18 for the early stage, or phase 1, trial, according to a filing on clinicaltrials.gov, a database of clinical trials run by the National Library of Medicine. The goal is to develop "personalized vaccines" that can treat breast cancer and melanoma, a form of skin cancer, the filing states. Fred Hutchinson is listed as a sponsor of the study, while Amazon is listed as a collaborator, according to the filing. News of the partnership was first reported by Business Insider. The study was first posted last October, and it began June 9. It's expected to be complete by Nov. 1 of 2023. An Amazon spokesperson confirmed the partnership, and said it's being led by Fred Hutch. "Amazon is contributing scientific and machine learning expertise to a partnership with Fred Hutch to explore the development of a personalized treatment for certain forms of cancer," the spokesperson told CNBC in a statement. "It's very early, but Fred Hutch recently received permission from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to proceed with a Phase I clinical trial, and it's unclear whether it will be successful. This will be a long, multi-year process -- should it progress, we would be open to working with other organizations in health care and life sciences that might also be interested in similar efforts."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: In 2020 [EndeavorRx] became the first such game to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for use in the treatment of ADHD in children. Currently only available on prescription from doctors in the US, EndeavorRx at first glance looks very similar to countless other games. You control a little alien that races on a spaceship through different worlds having to collect things. But the app-based game was developed in conjunction with neuroscientists, and is designed to stimulate and improve areas of the brain that play a key role in attention function. The idea is that it trains a child with ADHD to both better multitask and ignore distractions, with a computer algorithm measuring his or her performance and customizing the difficulty of the game in real time. When doctors prescribe it, the child's parents get sent an activation link that is needed before the game will play.

Eddie Martucci, chief executive of Akili, the Boston-based tech firm behind EndeavorRx, says the game has been designed to boost cognitive progressing. "It is something that's very difficult to get through molecular means, like taking a pill. But it turns out that sensory stimuli can actually directly stimulate parts of the brain controlling cognitive function." His company now plans to launch the game in Europe in the next few years. Akili is one of only a handful of companies with clearance to offer a digital therapeutic as a prescription for medical conditions. Late last year, the FDA approved a virtual reality-based treatment for children with the visual disorder amblyopia, or lazy eye.

Adding salt to meals at the table is linked to an earlier death, according to a study of 500,000 middle-aged Britons. From a report: Researchers found that always adding salt to food knocks more than two years off life expectancy for men and one-and-a-half years for women. This does not include seasoning during the cooking process. The study did not definitively rule out other factors, such as salt consumption being a proxy for a generally less healthy lifestyle, but the team behind the work said the evidence was compelling enough that people should consider avoiding seasoning their meals.

"To my knowledge, our study is the first to assess the relation between adding salt to foods and premature death," said Prof Lu Qi of Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in New Orleans, who led the work. "Even a modest reduction in sodium intake, by adding less or no salt to food at the table, is likely to result in substantial health benefits, especially when it is achieved in the general population." The findings were based on research involving more than 500,000 participants in the UK Biobank study, who were followed for an average of nine years. When joining the study between 2006 and 2010, they were asked, via a touchscreen questionnaire, whether they added salt to their foods and how often they did so.

Germany's BioNTech, Pfizer's partner in COVID-19 vaccines, said the two companies would start tests on humans of next-generation shots that protect against a wide variety of coronaviruses in the second half of the year. From a report: Their experimental work on shots that go beyond the current approach include T-cell-enhancing shots, designed to primarily protect against severe disease if the virus becomes more dangerous, and pan-coronavirus shots that protect against the broader family of viruses and its mutations. In presentation slides posted on BioNTech's website for its investor day, the German biotech firm said its aim was to "provide durable variant protection." The two partners, makers of the Western world's most widely used COVID-19 shot, are currently discussing with regulators enhanced versions of their established shot to better protect against the Omicron variant and its sublineages.

Rodrigo Perez Ortega writes via Science Magazine: With climate change, heat waves and cold fronts are worsening and taking lives worldwide: about 5 million in the past 20 years, according to at least one study. In a new study published today in Nature Medicine, an international team of researchers estimates that almost 900,000 deaths in the years between 2002 and 2015 could be attributable to extreme temperatures alone in major Latin American cities. This is the most detailed estimate in Latin America, and the first ever for some cities.

To estimate how many people died from intense heat or cold, researchers with the Urban Health in Latin America project -- which studies how urban environments and policies impact the health of city residents in Latin America -- looked at mortality data between 2002 and 2015 from registries of 326 cities with more than 100,000 residents, in nine countries throughout Latin America. They calculated the average daily temperatures and estimated the temperature range for each city from a public data set of atmospheric conditions. If a death occurred either on the 18 hottest or the 18 coldest days that each city experienced in a typical year, they linked it to extreme temperatures. Using a statistical model, the researchers compared the risk of dying on very hot and cold days, and this risk with the risk of dying on temperate days. They found that in Latin American metropolises, nearly 6% -- almost 1 million -- of all deaths between those years happened on days of extreme heat and cold. They also created an interactive map with the data for individual cities.

When the team analyzed the specific cause of these deaths in the registries, they found -- consistent with previous studies -- that extreme temperatures are often linked to deaths from cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. Extreme heat makes the heart pump more blood and causes dehydration and pulmonary stress. Extreme cold, on the other hand, can make the heart pump less blood and cause hypotension and, in some cases, organ failure. The team also found older adults are especially vulnerable to extreme temperatures, with 7.5% of deaths among them correlated to extreme heat and cold during the study period. Although the numbers varied from year to year, in 2015, for instance, more than 16,000 deaths -- out of nearly 855,000 -- among people ages 65 or older were attributable to extreme temperatures. Latin America's aging population is projected to rise more quickly than other parts of the world -- from 9% in 2020 to 19% in 2050, by some estimates (PDF). [...] Although deaths on extremely cold days -- about 785,000 -- were much higher than those on extremely hot days -- about 103,000 -- overall there were more days with intense cold, which could explain this difference. But for some cities, such as Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and Merida, heat is more deadly than cold: The researchers estimated that on very hot days, the chance of dying increases by 5.7% for every 1C increase in temperature.

Serhat Gumrukcu faces trial in a purported plot to kill an associate who could have exposed him and derailed a drug-development deal worth millions. From a report: Even as a teenager back in Turkey, Serhat Gumrukcu dazzled audiences. In a 2002 video, he opened one of his magic shows dancing with a cane that appeared to be levitating. He was introduced as a medical student and went by the stage name "Dr. No." A little more than a decade later, not long after Mr. Gumrukcu arrived in the U.S., he had his hand in multimillion-dollar oil and real-estate deals. Yet his best-known venture was in medicine. For a time, he thrilled investors with ideas for groundbreaking treatments and drew special notice from the government's top infectious-disease official, Anthony Fauci. In America, the magician had found a new, more lucrative audience.

Enochian Biosciences co-founded by Mr. Gumrukcu in 2018, paid more than $21 million to companies controlled by Mr. Gumrukcu and his husband for consulting, research and the licensing of potential drugs to treat influenza, hepatitis B, HIV and Covid-19, company financial filings show. "Dr. Gumrukcu is one of those rare geniuses that is not bound by scientific discipline or dogma. He sees connections and opportunities often missed," Enochian Vice Chairman Mark Dybul, now chief executive, said in a 2019 news release about Enochian's licensing of a hepatitis B drug from a company controlled by Mr. Gumrukcu. Mr. Gumrukcu's success as a biotech entrepreneur afforded the purchase last year of an $18.4 million office complex in North Hollywood, a neighborhood in Los Angeles, and, earlier, a $5.5 million house in the Hollywood Hills.

Yet much of what people saw in Mr. Gumrukcu was an illusion he cast, misrepresenting himself and his credentials, according to state and federal authorities, court records, former colleagues and those who have sued and won judgments against him over fraudulent medical and financial dealings. Prosecutors now allege that Mr. Gumrukcu arranged the murder of a business associate, Gregory Davis, who threatened to expose him as a fraud. Such a revelation would have put at risk the 39-year-old entrepreneur's deal with Enochian, they said. Mr. Gumrukcu has been in custody at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles since his arrest on May 24. A federal grand jury indicted him on murder conspiracy charges, an offense punishable by death.

Clinics offering debunked cancer treatments are still allowed to advertise, despite the company's stated efforts to control medical misinformation. From a report: The ad reads like an offer of salvation: Cancer kills many people. But there is hope in Apatone, a proprietary vitamin C-based mixture, that is "KILLING cancer." The substance, an unproven treatment that is not approved by the FDA, is not available in the United States. If you want Apatone, the ad suggests, you need to travel to a clinic in Mexico. If you're on Facebook or Instagram and Meta has determined you may be interested in cancer treatments, it's possible you've seen this ad, or one of the 20 or so others recently running from the CHIPSA hospital in Mexico near the US border, all of which are publicly listed in Meta's Ad Library. They are part of a pattern on Facebook of ads that make misleading or false health claims, targeted at cancer patients.

Evidence from Facebook and Instagram users, medical researchers, and its own Ad Library suggests that Meta is rife with ads containing sensational health claims, which the company directly profits from. The misleading ads may remain unchallenged for months and even years. Some of the ads reviewed by MIT Technology Review promoted treatments that have been proved to cause acute physical harm in some cases. Other ads pointed users toward highly expensive treatments with dubious outcomes. CHIPSA, which stands for Centro Hospitalario Internacional del Pacifico, S.A, was founded in 1979 and refers to itself as a community hospital offering integrative treatments for cancer. On Facebook, the facility describes itself as being at the "cutting edge" of cancer research. But the hospital's foundational diet-based therapy, called the Gerson Protocol, is "all nonsense," says David Gorski, a surgical oncologist at Wayne State University in Michigan and the managing editor of the website Science-Based Medicine. Developed by a German doctor in the 1920s to treat migraines, the regimen consists of a special diet and frequent "detox" procedures. It has been discredited for decades in the medical community.

"Researchers at Tsinghua University in China have developed a new drug cocktail that can convert cells into totipotent stem cells, the very seeds of life..." writes New Atlas: Not all stem cells are created equal — they sit in a branching hierarchy of differentiation potential. Multipotent stem cells are found in many tissues in adults, where they can turn into a few types of cells associated with that tissue or organ to help healing. A step earlier in the development tree are pluripotent stem cells, which are found in embryos and can become almost any type of cell in the body.

But at the top of the chain sit what are known as totipotent stem cells, which can become any cell in the body as well as supportive tissues like the placenta. These mark the very beginning of development, including the first single cell that forms from a fertilized egg, and they persist for the first few stages of development. After that, the cells differentiate into pluripotent stem cells and further specialize into all the cells of the body as it develops.

In recent years scientists have been able to take adult cells and induce a pluripotent state in them, which forms the basis of research into stem cell regenerative medicine. But in the new study, the Tsinghua team took things a step further, returning pluripotent stem cells to a totipotent state for the first time...

This breakthrough could open up some major new opportunities, the team says. In the long run, scientists could potentially create a living organism straight from a mature cell, sidestepping the need for sperm and eggs. That could help people have children who otherwise couldn't, or aid conservation of endangered species.

The researchers do acknowledge, however, that ethical concerns will no doubt arise.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader hackingbear for sharing the news.

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shares an announcement from London's Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine: A single MRI scan of the brain could be enough to diagnose Alzheimer's disease, according to new research by Imperial College London.

The research uses machine learning technology to look at structural features within the brain, including in regions not previously associated with Alzheimer's. The advantage of the technique is its simplicity and the fact that it can identify the disease at an early stage when it can be very difficult to diagnose. Although there is no cure for Alzheimer's disease, getting a diagnosis quickly at an early stage helps patients. It allows them to access help and support, get treatment to manage their symptoms and plan for the future. Being able to accurately identify patients at an early stage of the disease will also help researchers to understand the brain changes that trigger the disease, and support development and trials of new treatments....

The researchers adapted an algorithm developed for use in classifying cancer tumours, and applied it to the brain. They divided the brain into 115 regions and allocated 660 different features, such as size, shape and texture, to assess each region. They then trained the algorithm to identify where changes to these features could accurately predict the existence of Alzheimer's disease... They found that in 98 per cent of cases, the MRI-based machine learning system alone could accurately predict whether the patient had Alzheimer's disease or not. It was also able to distinguish between early and late-stage Alzheimer's with fairly high accuracy, in 79 per cent of patients.

Professor Eric Aboagye, from Imperial's Department of Surgery and Cancer, who led the research, said: "Currently no other simple and widely available methods can predict Alzheimer's disease with this level of accuracy, so our research is an important step forward...." The new system spotted changes in areas of the brain not previously associated with Alzheimer's disease, [which] opens up potential new avenues for research into these areas and their links to Alzheimer's disease.
Professor Aboagye adds that this new approach "could also identify early-stage patients for clinical trials of new drug treatments or lifestyle changes, which is currently very hard to do."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Earlier this year, news broke of the first experimental xenotransplantation: A human patient with heart disease received a heart from a pig that had been genetically engineered to avoid rejection. While initially successful, the experiment ended two months later when the transplant failed, leading to the death of the patient. At the time, the team didn't disclose any details regarding what went wrong. But this week saw the publication of a research paper that goes through everything that happened to prepare for the transplant and the weeks following. Critically, this includes the eventual failure of the transplant, which was triggered by the death of many of the muscle cells in the transplanted heart. But the reason for that death isn't clear, and the typical signs of rejection by the immune system weren't present. So, we're going to have to wait a while to understand what went wrong.
[...]
After death, the team performed an autopsy on the transplanted heart. They found that it had nearly doubled in weight, largely because of fluid (and some red blood cells) leaking out of blood vessels in the absence of clotting. There was significant death of heart muscle cells, but that was scattered across the heart, rather than being a general phenomenon. Critically, most of the indications of a strong immune rejection were missing. The presence of an apparent pig cytomegalovirus was worrying, but the researchers indicate there's some question about whether the tests that picked it up might have been recognizing a closely related human virus -- one that's often associated with organ transplant problems.

So, for now, it's not clear what happened with this transplant or what the significance of the apparent viral infection is. Obviously, the team has lots of material to work with to try to figure out what went on, and there's a long, long list of potential experiments to do with it. And there are also additional xenotransplant trials in the works, so it may not be long before we have a better sense of whether this was something specific to this transplant or a general risk of xenotransplantation.

Long-time Slashdot reader Mr_Blank shares a report from Gerona: China has enacted new regulation for the live-streaming industry, listing 31 prohibited conducts and raising the bar for influencers to speak out on specific topics, in the government's latest effort to regulate the booming digital economy. The 18-point guideline, released Wednesday by the National Radio and Television Administration and the Department of Culture and Tourism, requires influencers to have relevant qualifications to cover some subjects, including law, finance, medicine and education discuss, although the authorities have not specified the necessary qualifications.

The 31 prohibited conducts during live-streaming sessions include posting content that weakens or distorts the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, the socialist system, or the country's reform and opening-up. Other prohibited behaviors include using deepfake technologies to manipulate the images of party or state leaders and intentionally 'building up' sensitive issues and attracting public attention. Live streamers are also prohibited from showing an extravagant lifestyle, such as showing luxury products and cash, the policy said. This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post.

Google is still useful for many, but the harder question is why its results feel more sterile than they did five years ago. From a report: SEO expert Marie Haynes's theory is that this is the result of Google trying to crack down on misinformation and low-quality content -- especially around consequential search topics. In 2017, the company started talking publicly about a Search initiative called EAT, which stands for "expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness." The company has rolled out numerous quality rater guidelines, which help judge content to determine authenticity. One such effort, titled Your Money or Your Life, applies rigorous standards to any pages that show up when users search for medical or financial information.

"Take crypto," Haynes explained. "It's an area with a lot of fraud, so unless a site has a big presence around the web and Google gets the sense they're known for expertise on that topic, it'll be difficult to get them to rank." What this means, though, is that Google's results on any topic deemed sensitive enough will likely be from established sources. Medical queries are far more likely to return WebMD or Mayo Clinic pages, instead of personal testimonials. This, Haynes said, is especially challenging for people looking for homeopathic or alternative-medicine remedies.

There's a strange irony to all of this. For years, researchers, technologists, politicians, and journalists have agonized and cautioned against the wildness of the internet and its penchant for amplifying conspiracy theories, divisive subject matter, and flat-out false information. Many people, myself included, have argued for platforms to surface quality, authoritative information above all else, even at the expense of profit. And it's possible that Google has, in some sense, listened (albeit after far too much inaction) and, maybe, partly succeeded in showing higher-quality results in a number of contentious categories. But instead of ushering in an era of perfect information, the changes might be behind the complainers' sense that Google Search has stopped delivering interesting results.

The Guardian reports: Scientists have successfully developed a revolutionary cancer treatment that lights up and wipes out microscopic cancer cells, in a breakthrough that could enable surgeons to more effectively target and destroy the disease in patients.

A European team of engineers, physicists, neurosurgeons, biologists and immunologists from the UK, Poland and Sweden joined forces to design the new form of photoimmunotherapy. Experts believe it is destined to become the world's fifth major cancer treatment after surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy and immunotherapy. The light-activated therapy forces cancer cells to glow in the dark, helping surgeons remove more of the tumours compared with existing techniques — and then kills off remaining cells within minutes once the surgery is complete. In a world-first trial in mice with glioblastoma, one of the most common and aggressive types of brain cancer, scans revealed the novel treatment lit up even the tiniest cancer cells to help surgeons remove them — and then wiped out those left over. Trials of the new form of photoimmunotherapy, led by the Institute of Cancer Research, London, also showed the treatment triggered an immune response that could prime the immune system to target cancer cells in future, suggesting it could prevent glioblastoma coming back after surgery....

The therapy combines a special fluorescent dye with a cancer-targeting compound. In the trial in mice, the combination was shown to dramatically improve the visibility of cancer cells during surgery and, when later activated by near-infrared light, to trigger an anti-tumour effect.

Chinese bank depositors planning a protest about their frozen funds saw their health code mysteriously turn red and were stopped from traveling to the site of a rally, confirming fears that China's vast COVID-tracking system could be weaponized as a powerful tool to stifle dissent. Motherboard reports: A red health code designated the would-be protesters as suspected or confirmed COVID-19 patients, limiting their movement and access to public transportation. Their rallies in the central Henan province this week were thwarted as some were forced into quarantine and others detained by police. A 38-year-old software engineer was among hundreds who could not access their savings at four rural banks since mid-April. She had planned to travel from her home in Jiangxi province to Zhengzhou, Henan's capital city, to join a group petition this week to demand her money back. But her health code turned from green to red shortly after she bought a train ticket on Sunday. She said a nucleic test for COVID she took the night before came back negative and her hometown has not reported any infection recently.

"Henan authorities targeted the health code of bank depositors in order to stop us from defending our rights," she told VICE World News, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid government reprisal. She eventually managed to reach Zhengzhou using her green health code on a different app, but was daunted by the sight of police officers out in force. More than 200 bank depositors from all over the country saw their health codes turned red over the past week, which effectively foiled a planned protest outside the Henan branch of China's banking regulator. Chinese activists and dissidents have reported similar experiences in the past, but the latest crackdown appears to be the most brazen example of how the authorities could exploit the supposed COVID-19 measure for political purposes.

The member countries of the World Trade Organization agreed Friday on a narrow measure aimed at boosting the supplies of Covid-19 vaccines in developing countries, wrapping up a bitter fight over corporate patent rights governing critical medical products during a pandemic. WSJ: The compromise measure on intellectual property rights will make it easier for companies in developing nations such as South Africa to manufacture and export a patented Covid-19 vaccine -- under limited circumstances -- without a consent from the patent holder if they have the approval of their own governments. Meeting for the first time in nearly five years, trade ministers from more than 100 countries also agreed on measures to reduce fisheries subsidies to protect fish stocks and pledged to minimize export restrictions on food items amid shortages triggered by the war in Ukraine. An existing ban on the collection of customs duty on digitally-transmitted products like music and movies was continued, to the relief of U.S. officials who had feared a possible change in the status quo would harm U.S. businesses.

A small NYC-led cancer trial has achieved a result reportedly never before seen - the total remission of cancer in all of its patients. From a report: To be sure, the trial -- led by doctors at Memorial Sloan Kettering and backed by drug maker GlaxoSmithKline -- has only completed treatment of 12 patients, with a specific cancer in its early stages and with a rare mutation as well. But the results, reported Sunday in the New England Journal of Medicine and the New York Times, were still striking enough to prompt multiple physicians to tell the paper they were believed to be unprecedented. One cancer specialist told the Times it was an "unheard-of" result. According to the NEJM paper and the Times report, all 12 patients had rectal cancer that had not spread beyond the local area, and their tumors all exhibited a mutation affecting the ability of cells to repair damage to DNA.

British researchers have developed a biodegradable gel to repair damage caused by a heart attack in a breakthrough that could improve the health of millions of survivors worldwide. The Guardian reports: Now after years of efforts searching for solutions to help the heart repair itself, researchers at the University of Manchester have created a gel that can be injected directly into the beating heart -- effectively working as a scaffold to help injected cells grow new tissue. Until now, when cells have been injected into the heart to reduce the risk of heart failure, only 1% have stayed in place and survived. But the gel can hold them in place as they graft on to the heart.

To prove the technology could work, researchers showed the gel can support growth of normal heart muscle tissue. When they added human cells reprogrammed to become heart muscle cells into the gel, they were able to grow in a dish for three weeks and the cells started to spontaneously beat. Echocardiograms (ultrasounds of the heart) and electrocardiograms (ECGs, which measure the electrical activity of the heart) on mice confirmed the safety of the gel. To gain more knowledge, researchers will test the gel after mice have a heart attack to show they develop new muscle tissue. The study is being presented at the British Cardiovascular Society conference in Manchester.

"In molecular biologist David Sinclair's lab at Harvard Medical School, old mice are growing young again," reports CNN: Using proteins that can turn an adult cell into a stem cell, Sinclair and his team have reset aging cells in mice to earlier versions of themselves. In his team's first breakthrough, published in late 2020, old mice with poor eyesight and damaged retinas could suddenly see again, with vision that at times rivaled their offspring's.

"It's a permanent reset, as far as we can tell, and we think it may be a universal process that could be applied across the body to reset our age," said Sinclair, who has spent the last 20 years studying ways to reverse the ravages of time.

"If we reverse aging, these diseases should not happen. We have the technology today to be able to go into your hundreds without worrying about getting cancer in your 70s, heart disease in your 80s and Alzheimer's in your 90s." Sinclair told an audience at Life Itself, a health and wellness event presented in partnership with CNN.

"This is the world that is coming. It's literally a question of when and for most of us, it's going to happen in our lifetimes," Sinclair told the audience.... Sinclair said his lab has reversed aging in the muscles and brains of mice and is now working on rejuvenating a mouse's entire body.
The article points out that he's building on research by Japan's Dr. Shinya Yamanaka (which in 2007 won a Nobel prize).

But one key caveat: "Studies on whether the genetic intervention that revitalized mice will do the same for people are in early stages, Sinclair said. It will be years before human trials are finished, analyzed and, if safe and successful, scaled to the mass needed for a federal stamp of approval."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: A 20-year-old woman who was born with a small and misshapen right ear has received a 3-D printed ear implant made from her own cells, the manufacturer announced on Thursday. Independent experts said that the transplant, part of the first clinical trial of a successful medical application of this technology, was a stunning advance in the field of tissue engineering. The new ear was printed in a shape that precisely matched the woman's left ear, according to 3DBio Therapeutics, a regenerative medicine company based in Queens. The new ear, transplanted in March, will continue to regenerate cartilage tissue, giving it the look and feel of a natural ear, the company said.

The results of the woman's reconstructive surgery were announced by 3DBio in a news release. Citing proprietary concerns, the company has not publicly disclosed the technical details of the process, making it more difficult for outside experts to evaluate. The company said that federal regulators had reviewed the trial design and set strict manufacturing standards, and that the data would be published in a medical journal when the study was complete. The clinical trial, which includes 11 patients, is still ongoing, and it's possible that the transplants could fail or bring unanticipated health complications. But since the cells originated from the patient's own tissue, the new ear is not likely to be rejected by the body, doctors and company officials said.

According to a new study, dogs were able to better detect COVID-19 than PCR antigenic tests in both symptomatic and asymptomatic people. Slashdot Falconhell shares the report via The Guardian: In the study, trained dogs were able to detect Covid in 97% of symptomatic cases and nearly 100% of asymptomatic cases. The study featured 335 participants from Covid screening centers in Paris. Of the participants, 109 were positive with Covid, including 31 who were asymptomatic. The detection dogs, provided by French fire stations and the United Arab Emirates, received three to six weeks of training, depending on if a dog was previously trained for odor detection. The dogs sniffed samples of human sweat placed in an olfaction cone. If a dog detected Covid, it sat down in front of the cone.

Ultimately, the trained dogs were more sensitive to positive cases. Nasal PCR tests were better able to better detect negative cases. In two false positive cases, dogs falsely identified other coronavirus respiratory illness strains that were not Covid. While there have been previous studies on the capability of dogs to detect Covid, this is believed to be the first to compare the accuracy of dogs to antigenic tests. The study has been published in the journal Plos One.