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Medicine United States

Dogs Are Now Being Trained To Sniff Out Coronavirus 44

Posted by BeauHD from the man's-best-friend dept.
New Slashdot submitter Joe2020 shares a report from the BBC: Firefighters in Corsica, France, are aiming to teach canines how to sniff out coronavirus, as they can other conditions. It's hoped that detection dogs could be used to identify people with the virus at public places like airports. Their trial is one of several experiments being undertaken in countries including the UK and the USA. "Each individual dog can screen up to 250 people per hour," James Logan, head of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, told The Washington Post. "We are simultaneously working on a model to scale it up so it can be deployed in other countries at ports of entry, including airports." The dogs are trained using urine and saliva samples collected from patients who tested positive and negative for the disease.

"We don't know that this will be the odor of the virus, per se, or the response to the virus, or a combination," Cynthia Otto, director of the Working Dog Center at Penn's School of Veterinary Medicine, told the publication. "The dogs don't care what the odor is ... What they learn is that there's something different about this sample than there is about that sample."
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Dogs Are Now Being Trained To Sniff Out Coronavirus More

Dogs Are Now Being Trained To Sniff Out Coronavirus

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  • The virus itself? (Score:3)

    by pl1 ( 6811678 ) on Friday May 01, 2020 @09:01PM (#60013328)
    So if they are sniffing out coronavirus, they are necessarily infecting the canines.
  • Studies have shown, and federal courts have upheld [cornell.edu] (in the United States) that dogs may not be used as sole evidence to violate someone's 4th amendment rights (based on the animal's record of false positives). It will be interesting if this succeeds how this may be implemented in the United States. Travel is considered a constitutional right under the 5th amendment. "The right to travel is a part of the liberty of which the citizen cannot be deprived without due process of law under the Fifth Amendment." Ke [cornell.edu]

    • The problem with police dogs is that they mostly respond to subtle signals from their handler. If the handler thinks some black guy has drugs he can signal the dog to react, perhaps even unconsciously, and then use that as a pretext for a physical search.

      It is unlikely this bias occurs when the dogs sniff for C19. The dogs are sniffing urine containers, not people.

      Also, the repercussions are different. If the C19 sniffing is a false positive, there will likely be a confirming laboratory test. If the dru

  • We need testing. We don't know a fucking thing until we start doing a lot more testing, both for the virus and the antibodies. Right now, local hospitals and clinics and health departments cannot get sufficient tests.

    And we're almost two months after we were told that:

    “Anybody that needs a test, gets a test. They’re there. They have the tests. And the tests are beautiful.”

  • good boy of the shire, your paws walking to us are as the pitter patter of doom

  • I wonder if Joy Milne [bbc.co.uk] can smell Coronavirus too?
    That case is fascinating in that there is a living human that can smell things that the rest of us rely on dogs to sniff out.
    If the answer is a "yes", she can smell it, then that should add weight to the hope that dogs can be trained to do so as well.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by mmutka ( 5495542 )
      One of the symptoms of COVID-19 is losing sense of smell, which makes it dangerous to try to learn this scent if your species can be infected.

  • Yeehaw, send in the hounds! The dogs'll sniff 'em out - then we stomp 'em with the iron boot! Woo-wee, Covid Rouge forever!!

  • For just a screening test on crowds, you don't need to analyze molecular structure. Just vortex the aerosol particles onto differently reactive surfaces and use pattern recognition ML on the results.
    • Good question. A while back Wired published an article on Nano-Nose and Aromyx. Trained dogs about usd25k very versatile and fairly reliable in many use cases. The cyber snout tech still developing. Covid-19 might help push the tech. Though any test that is fast and effective such as urine would be very helpful.

  • I think Joe Biden has been training for that for decades. He's been sniffin' coronavirus before it was cool. And he was groping it, too.

  • best review on the dogs by the waxin keep going https://unlockmytv.fun/ [unlockmytv.fun]

  • Switching to odor as a coarse-screening mechanism sounds brilliant, because it scales.

    Just like dogs, machine learning can be trained to recognize odors presented to it digitally, and lots of us are experimenting with ML.

    You can build a nose on a 3d printer, https://www.sciencedaily.com/r... [sciencedaily.com]. The gas-sensing kind, not the kind Tycho Brahe wore.

    That means we could have sniffers everywhere, not just at the airport, and I could check for a smell-detectable disease when I arrive at the office, or a confe

  • Okay, before you leave, we need to have this dog rub its wet nose all over you, then we can do the next 50 people.

  • "Each individual dog can screen up to 250 people per hour," ..and after that hour it's exhausted until the next day.

  • ... the dog will find it!

  • Out of all those who went to the NYC emergency room with the coronavirus, only 31% had a high temperature. This is besides all those who are asymptomatic and have no symptoms from the coronavirus in the first place.

    It's still very much a mess.

  • Protecting our loved ones and our pets is very important. True, a new type of coronavirus has not been studied much, especially its effect on domestic animals such as cats and dogs. While there is no information about dogs, experts have reason to believe that cats can get COVID-19. However, it has not been established whether they can be carriers of the virus. You can find out more information about SARS-CoV-2 in Pets https://petonbed.com/sars-cov-... [petonbed.com] here I found a lot of interesting information

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