Sniffer dog for early detection of SARS Cov 2 cheap and very fast

09/08/2020 Views : 308

YENNI CIAWI

In order to break the chain of SARS-CoV-2 infection, early detection of infected individuals is essential. Volatile organic compounds produced during respiratory infections produced certain odour traces, which can be detected by trained dogs with a high degree of precision and very fast, 250 samples per hour. Dogs were able to distinguish between infected (positive) and uninfected (negative) individual samples with an average diagnostic sensitivity of 82.63% with a 95% confidence interval. In some case,  the level reaches 100%. These preliminary findings suggest that trained sniffer dogs can identify samples of respiratory secretions or saliva from SARS-CoV-2 infected individuals who are hospitalized by differentiating samples from SARS-CoV-2-infected and negative controls. This data can form the basis for a reliable screening method for people infected with SARS-CoV-2. Dogs can be trained quickly, in just a few days. The employment of this dog can be done in places where PCR tests are hard to find, suitable for poor countries that cannot afford the cost of a PCR test. This application can be applied at the airport, at bus or train stations, at the border of the country, or in the crowd. Initial dog training has been conducted at Pennsylvania's School of Veterinary Medicine, The USA, other pilot studies have been carried out at the University of Helsinki, in Germany, and in the UK. In fact, The UAE and Saudi Arabia have used covid sniffer dogs at their airports. Training is carried out with strict safety because dogs can also contract Covid-19.  A dog's sense of smell is a million times stronger than a human's. In addition to tracking the smell of Covid-19, sniffer dogs have also been used to detect several types of cancer, as well as Parkinson's disease, even long before the onset of the disease in sufferers.