The Medical Detection Dogs charity is currently training dogs to be able to detect COVID-19 in asymptomatic people. If successful, the dogs will be stationed at UK airports to check travellers coming into the country once lockdown measures have been relaxed.
Dr. Claire Guest, chief executive and co-founder of the charity, said: “In principle, we’re sure that dogs could detect COVID-19. We are now looking into how we can safely catch the odour of the virus from patients and present it to the dogs.”
She went on to say: “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.”
The charity has assigned six dogs to the project, Norman, Digby, Storm, Star, Jasper and Asher, and say that they may be able to detect the coronavirus in as little as 6-8 weeks.
These six dogs will be trained in the same way that the charity trains other dogs to detect diseases such as cancer, Parkinson’s, and bacterial infections – by sniffing samples in the charity’s training room and indicating when they have found them.
Once the dogs are able to do this, they would then move on to detection on people with the COVID-19 detector dogs working in a similar way to Medical Alert Assistance Dogs.
Professor James Logan, Head of the Department of Disease Control at The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, who is working in partnership with the Medical Detection Dogs charity on this project, said: “Our previous work demonstrated that dogs can detect odours from humans with malaria infection with extremely high accuracy – above the World Health Organisation standards for diagnostic.”
“We know that other respiratory diseases like COVID-19 change our body odour so there is a very high chance that dogs will be able to detect it. This new diagnostic tool could revolutionise our response to COVID-19 in the short term, but particularly in the months to come, and could be profoundly impactful.”
The charity has predicted that if the training is successful, their dogs will be able to test up to 750 people per hour, identifying not only a change in their odour but also having the ability to detect individuals with a slightly raised temperature.
Professor Steve Lindsay at Durham University said: “If the research is successful, we could use COVID-19 dogs at airports at the end of the epidemic to rapidly identify people carrying the virus. This would help the re-emergence of the disease after we have brought the present epidemic under control.”
The charity has assured that their dogs will not be able to further spread the virus, confirming that they will be trained on a dead virus and then have no direct contact with the individuals they are screening; instead, sniffing the air around them to detect COVID-19.
This training programme will require funding of £1 million to complete the work, and the charity has currently set up a crowdfunding page to raise £500,000 to train the dogs.
