Amidst the coronavirus pandemic, countries worldwide placed strict health protocols to prevent the spread of the virus. That includes stringent health checks at airports or seaports and the implementation of basic protocols such as social distancing or wearing masks. The current gold standard for detecting the virus in an infected person is polymerase chain reaction (PCR) based tests. But, canines show favorable results in detecting the virus.
In September 2020, the Helsinki Airport in Finland deployed dogs who have been trained to sniff Covid-19 from samples. Initial studies show that their method is almost 100% reliable and cheap, without the discomfort of the nasal swabbing tests currently used as the gold standard for testing. The Covid-19 dogs are still on their pilot program, though, and testing through them is purely voluntary.
Travelers who would like to volunteer for the test will just swab their neck or wrist using wipes. Then they placed the wipes in a can for the dogs to sniff if they have the virus or not. Then, the standard testing follows afterward to confirm whether the dogs are correct.
According to Anna Hielm-Bjorkman, a professor at the University of Helsinki who is in charge of the pilot program, the dogs they deployed at the airport are good at detecting the virus. They came close to a 100% accuracy rate. And they can sense the virus five days before the symptoms start to show.
Some of the dogs included in the trial are not new to sniffing diseases. One of them is the 8-year-old Greyhound mix named Koosi, an expert in sniffing cancer patients. Koosi remarkably learned to identify the Covid-19 virus in only seven minutes.
Preliminary studies show that to detect the virus, the dogs only need 100 molecules or less, considerably lesser than the 19 million molecules used in PCR-testing. However, further studies are still required to make sure that the method is accurate. Once this program’s efficacy is proven, society can benefit from a faster, more reliable, and more cost-efficient way of detecting the virus.
Photo credits to Helsinki Airport via Twitter and CNBC via YouTube.