Researchers Train Dogs To Sniff Out Covid Patients, 94% Accuracy Found - Could Be Useful At Airports

The dogs were even able to sniff out asymptomatic or mild Covid-19 cases besides cases caused by a mutant variant that emerged in the UK.

Anti-Covid dogs in the room where they smell the swabs trained by professionals. (Getty Image)

New Delhi: In what may surprise many, a new detector for identifying the virus has come to the fore amid the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic with a study suggesting that sniffer dogs can be trained to identify the people infected with the deadly virus by their odour.

These dogs could soon be used at the airports or mass gathering venues to pick up the “corona odour” of Covid-19 infected people, Reuters reported researchers at the London School of Tropical Medicine, who presented a new study as saying.

The dogs were even able to sniff out asymptomatic or mild Covid-19 cases besides cases caused by a mutant variant that emerged in the UK during the study, which involved 3,500 odour samples donated in the form of unwashed socks or T-shirts worn by the public and healthcare workers, according to the researchers, led by disease control specialist James Logan.

“The highest-performing dogs in the trial detected coronavirus odour in the samples with up to 94.3% sensitivity, meaning a low risk of false-negative results, and up to 92% specificity,” the researchers said.

“Dogs could be a great way to screen a large number of people quickly and prevent Covid-19 from being re-introduced into the UK,” Reuters quoted Steve Lindsay, a professor at Durham University’s department of biosciences who worked on the study, as saying.

A major advantage of sniffer dogs over other screening methods is their “incredible speed and good accuracy among large groups of people”, the researchers said, adding similar pilot projects involving dogs are underway in Germany, Chile and Finland.

The Indian Army had earlier trained canines to detect Covid-19 virus for a quick and a real time situation for easier movements of troops.