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Medicine

Dogs Can Detect COVID-19 With Great Accuracy (theguardian.com) 66

Posted by BeauHD from the good-boy dept.
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.
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Dogs Can Detect COVID-19 With Great Accuracy More

Dogs Can Detect COVID-19 With Great Accuracy

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  • COVID prevention dog!

  • just wait the for NEW DRUG DOG for COVID missed used by the GOVERNMENT

  • Its going to be like the Terminator movie ... a pair of German Shepherds giving everyone a sniff at the entrance to the building.
  • Perhaps the word 'and' was missing from that summary. The article doesn't have a "PCR antigenic test", it has 3 different tests, one has "PCR" in it, and another has "antigen" in it.

  • Good Dog!

  • Dogs are awesome! & not only at sniffing out c (Score:3)

    by Phact ( 4649149 ) on Thursday June 02, 2022 @08:28PM (#62588522)

    A dogs time in the bathroom is limited to a quick drink,
    and dogs are always happy when your friends come over.

  • the WHO knew this 2 years ago (Score:5, Funny)

    by TheGratefulNet ( 143330 ) on Thursday June 02, 2022 @09:52PM (#62588662)

    WHO told us a few years ago that dogs are not a covid risk and now we find out that they are actually useful in this area.

    in other words, WHO let the dogs out. again.

  • Can we engineer something similar? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Vegan Cyclist ( 1650427 ) on Thursday June 02, 2022 @10:18PM (#62588710) Homepage

    Curious what exactly they're smelling...? Probably not the virus itself..but if infected, I guess there's some hormone or other substance released in our sweat that is the tell? (Which is why they also had false-positives with other corona viruses.)

    And we have 'smelling' devices, can we isolate whatever it is the dogs are smelling, and come up with something that can smell/detect whatever 'that' is?

    • Oh, they knew all right. A simple urine strip test will also spot it. Loss of Potassium basically. Eating bananas, Mangos and Apricots may mask their detection rates (as well as renal failure/issues), In Australia Covid test strips are 5 for $50 retail . I would like to see dogs at the airport. I eagerly the blind ivermectin studies with adjuncts(not just ivm) results.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fazig ( 2909523 )
      Hypothetically a neural net trained algorithm could be able to do that if paired with some 'smelling device' that is good enough.
      Though I'm not sure how you'd build a general purpose smelling device. It's not too difficult to design a special purpose smelling device, which detects the presence of specific chemical compounds with a chemical sensor that is designed to detect that compound. But before you can design such a sensor, you need to know what compound you're looking for.

      Thus since dogs already hav

      • I know this won't be widely accepted, but as a vegan I'm not crazy about exploiting animals.

        That aside, dogs can be temperamental, and can't work 24/7. And we can't possibly breed and train enough dogs to make this a viable test method for COVID.

        A post below points out there are VOCs that our bodies release when we're infected with COVID, would be great to see those VOCs identified, and then a specific device created to detect them. Apparently any coronavirus generates the same VOCs (identified in the art

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by fazig ( 2909523 )
          I always thought the name was sarcastic.

          But sure, if you wanted to get rid of "animal slavery", much like with historic human slavery, you'd need to convince a large enough group of people, that's invested their money into the slavery employing practice and profits from it, that there are more profitable alternatives to "slave labour".


          Otherwise the empathy level towards working animals is likely too low. I mean we're still breeding horribly deformed dogs like pugs, that may have trouble breathing and c

          • Nope, long-time vegan, and long-time bike racer (spent almost 50min zipping around at over 43kph in a race today.)

            Agree it's an uphill battle, but not too long ago the talk of abolishing human slavery was completely laughable and inconceivable to most. (Even the slaves themselves.) Although I just heard a stat that there are about 40 million human slaves today, which is more than the US ever had....so that's far from resolved.

            And it's essentially the same mentality that allows it to persist today, that othe

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mjwx ( 966435 )

      Curious what exactly they're smelling...? Probably not the virus itself..but if infected, I guess there's some hormone or other substance released in our sweat that is the tell? (Which is why they also had false-positives with other corona viruses.)

      And we have 'smelling' devices, can we isolate whatever it is the dogs are smelling, and come up with something that can smell/detect whatever 'that' is?

      Erm... that is pretty much how we diagnose most pathogen via tests. Not by detecting the pathogen, but by the effects, chemicals and antibodies that occur as a result.

      The major issue with dogs is the amount of time it takes to train them to sniff out different things. For a drug sniffer dog, it takes 6-8 months to make them reliable enough for use, then they'll be sniffing out the same thing for life. With viruses, they can change so fast that by the time a dog is trained on one illness it may have mutat

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jbengt ( 874751 )

        With viruses, they can change so fast that by the time a dog is trained on one illness it may have mutated or disappeared entirely.

        According to the study, it takes 3 to 6 weeks to train the dogs, not months or years. This is not beyond a reasonable doubt training, just good enough to be as good or better than the invasive tests (and happens to be faster, too).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jbengt ( 874751 )

      Curious what exactly they're smelling...?

      It's right there in the study: VOCs that the infected cells give off.

      • I skimmed through but missed this, thanks! So to complete my question: can we create a device that detects these particular VOCs? (Or are we even able to isolate what VOCs COVID creates in humans?)

  • Here's how you do it:

    1. cough in the critter's face
    2. wait about a week
    3. if the critter gets covid, so did you: profit!

    • Yes, dogs can actually catch Covid19. I wonder if their sense of smell is affected while they fight against the disease? Can they still work as a testing dog if they are positive?

  • late to the game (Score:3)

    by kpoole55 ( 1102793 ) on Thursday June 02, 2022 @11:40PM (#62588844)

    Finland was using dogs to sniff out COVID back in 2020. They were dependable then. How did this take so long here?

    • No kidding, and were more accurate than the other tests

    • Because nobody gets rich by doing it.

    • Doesn't scale well.

      • Of course they scale well. Just train larger dogs, like Great Danes, silly.

        Or alternatively, train a pack of chihuahuas, so you can do more testing in parallel for the same amount of dog food.

    • Because it is useless since day one. Covid is widespread, looking for it doesn't make any sense.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mark-t ( 151149 )
        It really wasn't that widespread in 2020 though. Remember, that was pre-omicron and even pre-delta, both of which were significant game changers in the evolution of the pandemic.
        • Covid alpha was already mega contagious. At the very begining, covid was invisible and already everywhere when cases started to skyrocket. Dogs would have been as useless as closing borders has been. Definition of skyrocket changed for each variant, but it has been mega bad since day 1.That's just like, my opinion.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by mark-t ( 151149 )

            Compared to Delta. Alpha was not actually all that contagious. You could in general avoid catching Alpha almost entirely through simple physical distancing and good hygiene.

            The R0 for Alpha was higher than 1 (which is still pretty bad), but also still considerably less than 2. The R0 for Delta, by comparison was more than 5.

    • The problem was it actually worked without taking anyone's rights away. We can't tolerate such solutions. :P
  • Anyone heard of a seeing-eye cat, a bomb-sniffing cat, guard cat, drug-sniffing cat, or a search-and-rescue cat?

    Meanwhile cats are considered an invasive species everywhere, kill off billions of birds and other small animals every year (including causing many species to go extinct), and will transmit toxoplasmosis which is bad for pregnant women.

    • But... So cute!

    • Also, cats have been caught smuggling drugs into prisons worldwide.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by laxguy ( 1179231 )

      i heard cats also pushed an old lady over in the street, oh the horror!

    • Anyone heard of a seeing-eye cat, a bomb-sniffing cat, guard cat, drug-sniffing cat, or a search-and-rescue cat?

      No, but cats tend to handle mice and rats, which spread diseases and create issues with food storage and distribution when left unchecked.

      The need for bomb sniffing is occasional, and I'm glad that there are dogs trained to do it...but pest control is needed every hour of every day, everywhere...and cats do it better.

  • Other dogs can find viruses too small for the eye but my mutt never can find her tennis-ball.

  • See Spot sniff covid. See Spot get covid. Cough Spot cough! Can it happen?
  • Are these the same highly-trained dogs that magically find drugs when their handler wants them to? https://www.npr.org/2017/11/20... [npr.org]

  • The study used olfaction cones prepared with sweat or saliva samples, which sounds like it would result in some relatively concentrated odors. The sweat samples were collected where "the participants to place two sterile surgical compresses under their armpits for 2 min".

    The results are interesting, but "Further studies will be focused on direct sniffing by dogs to evaluate sniffer dogs for mass pre-test in airports, harbors, railways stations, cultural activities or sporting events".

  • From what I'm reading (two false positives sick with something else), it sounds like they're really just detecting that people are sick, not detecting what they're sick with. The next question is whether they also get false positives from non-contagious diseases.

    If the specificity isn't too bad, I could absolutely see them using this as a pre-screening to figure out who to rapid test at airports... but only if the specificity isn't too bad.

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