German study shows dogs can sniff out coronavirus

Guwahati: Dogs are capable of detecting the novel coronavirus in patient samples "with a high rate of precision", according to a study by a German veterinary university.

After a week-long training, eight dogs from Germany's armed forces were able to perfectly identify the virus with a 94% success rate, according to a pilot project led by the University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover.

Notably, researchers challenged the dogs to sniff out Covid-19 in the saliva of more than 1,000 healthy and infected people. "We think that this works because the metabolic processes in the body of a deceased patient are completely changed," Maren von Koeckritz-Blickwede, a professor from the German university, stated in a YouTube video regarding the project. "We think that the dogs are able to detect a specific smell", she added further.

Dogs have a sense of smell around 1,000 times more sensitive than humans that could be deployed to detect infections in public areas like airports, border crossings, and sporting events with proper training, according to the researchers.

The study was a collaboration between the German armed forces, the Hannover Medical School, and the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf. Von Koeckritz-Blickwede further informed that the next step will be to train dogs to differentiate Covid-19 samples from other diseases like influenza.

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