The olfactories of eight Labradors are being honed to detect the coronavirus in humans.
Over the course of the next few months, Miss M., Poncho and six other chocolate, black and yellow labs are being trained at the Penn Vet Working Dog Center.
“We don’t know that this will be the odor of the virus, per se, or the response to the virus, or a combination,” Dr. Cynthia Otto, who is leading the project, told The Washington Post. “But the dogs don’t care what the odor is. … What they learn is that there’s something different about this sample than there is about that sample.”
>> Coronavirus: Dog in North Carolina tests positive
The training can take months, but researchers hope to have the scent detection dogs screening live humans by July.
Dr. Cynthia Otto of the @PennVetWDC will lead a study to see if scent detection dogs can tell the difference between #COVID19 + and - patients. Drs. Ronald Harty and Andrew Vaughan are also conducting COVID research at Penn Vet. Read about the study at https://t.co/VTK0RQfpLn pic.twitter.com/0hNbbJPlET
— Penn Vet (@pennvet) April 29, 2020
“That’s going to be the next proof of concept: Can we train them to identify it when a person has it and that person’s moving? Or even standing still?” Otto told the Post.
>> Coronavirus: Social distancing taking a toll on English bulldog, Big Poppa
Dogs are already used to sniff for explosives, contraband, diabetes and other diseases.
Researchers training dogs to identify malaria infections in a study at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine also hope to use the animals to detect the coronavirus.
>> Coronavirus: CDC adjusts pet social distancing guidelines if you test positive for COVID-19
“We do not know if COVID-19 has a specific odor yet, but we know that other respiratory diseases change our body odor so there is a chance that it does,” Professor James Logan, who is leading the study, said in a statement. “And if it does, dogs will be able to detect it. This new diagnostic tool could revolutionize our response to COVID-19.”
It’s unclear where the dogs might be deployed once they are trained. Hospitals, airports and areas where outbreaks occur would be ideal as the dogs would have the ability to test hundreds or thousands of people in a short amount of time.
“The exciting area is the sort of convergence with what dogs are currently doing with (the Transportation Security Administration) and screening for explosives,” Otto told the Post. “If we can do a similar approach for screening humans, then there will be a large interest.”
