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Chris Smith
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- Coronavirus testing is done using PCR tests that analyze the contents of a nasal swab, making screening campaigns cumbersome in certain situations.
- Researchers have found a way to improve the time it takes to detect COVID-19 patients: Dogs trained to sniff out an odor specific to the illness have been deployed at the Helsinki airport in Finland.
- In lab conditions, a dog needed about 10 seconds to conduct the test, and it was able to identify the novel coronavirus nearly 100% of the time.
It was in late March when reports said the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the UK was looking to train dogs to sniff out patients infected with the novel coronavirus. Researchers explained that certain illnesses have a direct effect on the odor of the patient, and dogs can be trained to recognize that smell. Doctors have trained labradors and ****er spaniels to detect malaria so well that their accuracy exceeded WHO standards. Still, questions remained about using dogs to detect the novel virus. First of all, a sniff test should be safe for the dog trained to recognize the smell, as there have been some cases where dogs caught COVID-19 from their owners. Secondly, the sniff test still has to be confirmed via a proper PCR test. And finally, this testing method has obvious limitations: You can only train so many dogs to detect COVID-19 patients, and they can only cover a limited amount of ground.
Nearly six months later, researchers from Finland now say their dogs need only a few seconds to smell the virus, and the process works almost 100% of the time. Those dogs will “work” in Helskinki’s airport to screen passengers, and the program might be cheaper than testing everyone who passes through customs using conventional means. Finland is the first country in Europe to pilot the coronavirus-sniffing dog test in airports, but other countries have already implemented similar mass-testing programs.
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Scientists found a way to detect coronavirus infections in 10 seconds originally appeared on BGR.com on Fri, 25 Sep 2020 at 15:02:11 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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