Dogs are being trained to sniff out the coronavirus at universities in Pennsylvania and in the UK — in what experts say could “revolutionize” screening for the deadly illness.
The life-saving pooches will likely be used to screen people at airports, businesses and hospitals to prevent the pathogen from spreading, according to researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.
The dutiful dogs “could revolutionize our response to COVID-19,” James Logan, head of the London university’s disease control department, told the Washington Post. Researchers at the school previously demonstrated that canines could identify malaria infections in humans, and now hope to train and deploy six coronavirus-sniffing dogs to airports in the UK.
“Each individual dog can screen up to 250 people per hour,” he said. “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.”
At the University of Pennsylvania, eight Labrador retrievers started their training this month, learning to identify an odor for a food reward, according to the Washington Post.
The pups will then train using urine and saliva samples collected from patients who tested positive and negative for COVID-19.
“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.”
The final and most difficult stage of training will be teaching the canines to sniff out the virus in a human.
“That’s going to be the next proof of concept: Can we train them to identify it when a person has it and that person’s moving?” Otto said.
If demand is high for the virus-sniffing dogs in the US, chemists and physicists may then use what they learn from the animals to create an electronic “nose” or sensor to identify the pathogen, the outlet reports.
In the past, canines have been trained to detect malaria, cancer and even a bacterium that kills off oranges in Florida.