Can dogs help in detecting COVID-19 symptoms in future?

As restrictions imposed to combat COVID-19 all around the world is being gradually lifted and social-distancing restrictions are relaxed, efforts to protect the population against the virus has become more significant.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to more than 460,000 deaths to date.

 The longer stability of the virus in the environment is one of the primary reasons for the comparably high infection rate associated with the virus.

As The Ministry of Public Health (MoPH), Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC), and the Primary Healthcare Corporation (PHCC) intensify awareness campaign and preventive measures on COVID-19,  biomedical researchers, and clinicians, including those in Qatar, are working tirelessly to come up with effective and innovative approaches to control the impact of COVID-19.

 Substantial efforts are being made to develop a vaccine against the virus, discovering new drugs as well as testing those already in clinical use for the treatment of other diseases, and determining the effectiveness of plasma therapy. 

In this situation, dogs (canines), often called humans' best friend with an exceptionally sophisticated sense of smell, enabling them to be 10,000 to 100,000 times more sensitive than ours in ‘picking up’ an array of odors with up to 300 million smell receptors compared to six million in humans dogs are uniquely positioned to aid in disease detection.

As dogs have historically been useful to humans in many ways, for their service in detecting different chemicals, including contraband drugs and dangerous explosive and most importantly, dogs have proven to help in detecting some types of diseases such as cancer and malaria, which has certainly made them excellent helpers in disease diagnosis in the past. 

A new research program at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Veterinary Medicine (Penn Vet) utilizing scent detection dogs to discriminate between samples from COVID-19 positive and COVID-19 negative. 

Penn Vet will initially begin the study with eight dogs to perform this precise detection work. Over three weeks through a process called odor imprinting, the dogs will be exposed to COVID-19 positive saliva and urine samples in a laboratory setting. Once the dogs learn the odor, the investigators will document that the dogs can discriminate between COVID-19 positive and COVID-19 negative samples in a laboratory setting, establishing the platform for testing to determine if the dogs can identify COVID-19 infected people.

Here's everything you need to know about the virus, including ways to protect yourself. 

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 Source: Hamad Bin Khalifa University