Amid the race of finding a coronavirus vaccine, Finland has deployed coronavirus-sniffing dogs at Helsinki Airport to identify infected travelers after a four-month trial of an alternative testing method.
This is considered to be a new technique that can help find the COVID-19 carriers. The passengers are asked to swipe their skin with a wipe which is put in a jar, and is given to a dog waiting in a separate booth to sniff out the virus at the airport.
It just takes 10 seconds for the dog to sniff the virus samples before it gives the test result by scratching a paw, laying down, barking, or doing something unusual, letting everybody know about the test results.
It just takes a minute to complete the whole process, and if the result turns out to be positive then the passenger is asked to take a standard PCR coronavirus test to check its accuracy.
The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the UK has already announced that it is looking to train dogs to sniff out patients infected with COVID-19.
Researchers suggest that there is a different odor of certain illnesses in the patients, and dogs can be trained to recognize that smell.
Earlier, doctors have been successful in training Labradors and cocker spaniels to detect malaria. They did it so well that their accuracy exceeded WHO standards. But it remains to be seen how successful will be Coronavirus-Sniffing Dogs in detecting the novel coronavirus.
After six months of research, the researchers from Finland revealed that their dogs need only a few seconds to smell the virus, and the process was found to be successful in 100% of cases.
These dogs will “work” in Helskinki’s airport to monitor passengers and this process will be cheaper as compared to the other testing programs. Finland is not the only country to pilot the COVID-sniffing dog test at airports as there are other countries too which have already implemented a similar mass testing process.
The University of Helsinki researchers said that the sniffing dog can detect the virus within 10 seconds, and the entire process takes less than a minute to complete.
This test is performed keeping in mind the health of the dogs at priority. After arriving at the airport the passengers need to collect their luggage and they are asked to wipe their skin and gradually the wipe is contained in a container.
Then it is placed at a different booth next to other boxes with control scents in them and then the sniffing process starts gradually. If this test works, this could prove a great screening method in other public places like hospitals and gatherings.
It is very interesting to see that in the preliminary test, dogs identify the virus with nearly 100% accuracy and even can pick up the earlier scent of the patients who developed any symptoms.
There was evidence that sweat from COVID-positive people smells different from the sweat of healthy people. This might be the reason why the dogs can detect the Covid infection.
The researchers stated that the dogs could identify COVID-19 using a much smaller sample than regular PCR tests. This means a quantity of 10-100 molecules is enough for dogs to sniff out the virus, compared to 18 million molecules for a lab test.
Other countries that performed these tests include the UK, Finland, Australia, France, and Germany, while The Dubai international airport also started a similar program last month.
