New Delhi: A group of researchers from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), Medical Detection Dogs and Durham University is working to find out whether dogs can help detect Coronavirus patients.

According to the LSHTM news “The aim is that dogs will be able to screen anyone, including those who are asymptomatic and tell us whether they need to be tested. This would be fast, effective and non-invasive and make sure the limited NHS testing resources are only used where they are really needed.” Says Dr Claire Guest, CEO, and Co-Founder of Medical Detection Dogs

Dogs searching for COVID-19 would be trained the same way dogs are trained to detect cancer, Parkinson’s or bacterial disease - by sniffing samples in the training room and indicating which contains the disease or infection. Although it is not known whether COVID-19 has any specific odour but other respiratory diseases cause changes in body odour so chances of COVID-19 doing the same is possible too.

Professor James Logan, Head of the Department of Disease Control at LSHTM and Director of ARCTEC, says: “Our previous work demonstrated that dogs can detect odours from humans with a malaria infection with extremely high accuracy – above the World Health Organization standards for a diagnostic." read the article submitted by LSHTM.

If the research is successful the researchers believe that the dogs could supplement ongoing testing by screening for the virus accurately and rapidly, potentially triaging up to 250 people per hour.  These COVID-19 detection dogs can be used at airports at the end of the epidemic to rapidly identify people carrying the virus.