Medical Detection Dogs have potential to be used for mass screening of people for Covid-19 at transport hubs such as airports.
Professor James Logan from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine says dogs have been used successfully to detect other diseases and his team is switching focus to Covid.
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“We know from previous work we’ve done that malaria has a distinctive odour associated with it.
“Lots of diseases have odour associated with them that are really quite specific.”
There is every chance this is also the case with Covid-19, he says.
The initial stages of the study are underway, he says.
“We’re almost ready to collect samples, once we’ve collected samples from people who are infected and uninfected, these will be odour samples, we will then present those to the dogs and begin the training of the dogs.
“The beautiful thing about this is it’s actually very quick, so within weeks we’ll know whether the dogs can detect it, and within 8 to 10 weeks we’ll have dogs that are fully trained and ready to be deployed here in the UK.”
If successful detection dogs could screen vast numbers of people, he says.
“Each individual dog could screen up to 250 people per hour, so we’re looking at potentially using dogs at airports and at other travel hubs.”
“We don’t know if Covid-19 does this but we’ve got reason to believe it would.”
Nature has designed dogs to be the “perfect bio-sensor” he says, coupled with dogs’ ability to learn this makes them a potent detection tool.
“There’s Lots of robust scientific evidence behind this and we hope it will work forCovid-19,” Prof Logan says.
So effective are dogs that they outperform lab testing, he says.
“Odour signals tend to be very complex, so it you think about human odour contains five to six hundred different chemicals, it’s very complex.”
This makes it difficult for machines to isolate specific compounds, dogs have evolved to do just that, he says.
They will soon start to collect odour samples from NHS staff using face masks and socks and stockings, he says.
“These materials are very, very good at retaining odours.”
There will be emphasis on collecting samples from people who are asymptomatic.
“It’s important to be able to detect people who don’t yet have any symptoms, so they can then self-isolate.”
Prof Logan is hopeful dogs could be deployed by the end of the year in the UK and thereafter scaled up internationally.
