Anonymous
By Sonia Fernandez, UC Santa Barbara
It’s an idea that has finally gained scientific consensus: Dogs can be a faster, more precise, less expensive — not to mention friendlier — method of detecting COVID-19 than even our best current technology. A growing number of studies over the last two or so years has highlighted the power of dogs in detecting the stealthy virus and its variants, even when they are obscured by other viruses, like those from common colds and flu.
“It went from four papers to 29 peer-reviewed studies — that includes more than 400 scientists from over 30 countries and 31,000 samples,” said UC Santa Barbara Distinguished Professor Emeritus Tommy Dickey, who with collaborator Heather Junqueira of BioScent, Inc., gathered the recent massive number of findings into a review published in the Journal of Osteopathic Medicine.
From their rigorous survey of exclusively peer-reviewed studies published by traditional academic publishers covering both field and clinical experiments, Dickey and Junqueira assert that the collective research demonstrates that trained scent dogs are “as effective and often more effective” than the antigen tests we’re keeping handy at home, as well as the gold-standard reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) tests deployed in clinics and hospitals. Not only can dogs detect the SARS-CoV-2 virus faster, they can do so in a non-intrusive manner, without the environmental impact that comes with single-use plastics.
“They can detect the equivalent of one drop of an odorous substance in 10.5 Olympic-sized swimming pools. For perspective, this is about three orders of magnitude better than with scientific instrumentation.”
The dog standard
The magic lies in their highly evolved noses, with physical and neural optimizations for smell. Dogs have hundreds of millions of olfactory receptors, compared to roughly five to six million for humans, and a full third of their brains are devoted to interpreting smells, compared to a scant 5% in human brains. All these enhancements mean that dogs can detect very low concentrations of odors associated with COVID infections.
“They can detect the equivalent of one drop of an odorous substance in 10.5 Olympic-sized swimming pools,” Dickey said. “For perspective, this is about three orders of magnitude better than with scientific instrumentation.” In some cases, dogs were able to detect COVID in pre-symptomatic and asymptomatic patients whose viral load was too low for conventional tests to work. And not only that, Dickey added, dogs can distinguish COVID and its variants in the presence of other potentially confounding respiratory viruses, such as those of the common cold or flu.
“They’re much more effective,” Dickey said. “In fact one of the authors that we quote in the paper commented that the RT-PCR test is not the gold standard anymore. It’s the dog.
“And they’re so quick,” he added. “They can give you the yes or no within seconds, if they’re directly smelling you.”
In some scenarios the dog gave the person a quick sniff, sitting down to indicate the presence of COVID. In others, the dog was given a sweat sample to smell, a process that could take a few minutes. The speed is especially important in situations like the earlier phase of the pandemic, when a gap of days between test and result could mean an exponential rise in infections if the person was positive, or scenarios that involve a high volume of people.
Scent dogs such as beagles, basset hounds and coonhounds would be the ideal dog for the task, given their natural tendencies to rely on odors to relate to the world, but the studies showed a variety of other dogs are up to the challenge. Given a few weeks of training, puppies and older dogs, males and females, purebreds and mixed breeds all performed admirably. In one study, a “problem” pit bull terrier that had been abused found a second chance by becoming a perfectly capable COVID detector.
Despite these glowing reviews, there remain challenges to placing man’s best friend in the mainstream of medical diagnoses, although the animals have proven successful in the detection of other conditions, such as diabetes and cancer.
“There’s quite a bit of research, but it’s still considered by many as a kind of a curiosity,” said Dickey, a professor emeritus of geography whose love for Great Pyrenees dogs led him to become a certified therapy dog handler and author of therapy dog books after he retired from formal teaching at UCSB.
Places that were open to using dogs in field experiments tended to be smaller countries such as Finland and Colombia, where there was a desire to explore fast and cost-effective methods of detecting COVID without having to wait for expensive tests to be developed or for reagents to become available.
Of their study, Dickey and Junqueira added, “After conducting this comprehensive review, we believe that scent dogs deserve their place as a serious diagnostic methodology that could be particularly useful during future pandemics, potentially as part of rapid routine health screenings in public spaces. Perhaps, most importantly, we argue that the impressive international quality and quantity of COVID scent dog research described in our paper for the first time, demonstrates that medical scent dogs are finally ready for a host of mainstream medical applications.”
Wow, that’s pretty amazing! Undoubtedly, there will be pandemics in the future and hopefully, this research can be utilized. It’s tragic looking back at how many people died due to the lag time between testing and results. This is why isolation and caution were so necessary.
CHIP – so if we have another highly contagious and deadly pandemic, we’re not going to utilize this new research? Or are you saying we will not isolate and use caution? Which are you saying “we’re not doing?”
Sorry sac, we’re not doing the covid thing again. Not only are most people unwilling to go through it again, our economy is unable to sustain another covid style disruption. Just look at how much more expensive everything is now! It’s easy to be removed from economic realities in a wealthy enclave like Santa Barbara, but most people will continue to suffer from heavy handed covid restrictions for years to come.
Chip, you might want to keep your eye on emerging infectious diseases and the increased presence of Aedes mosquitos, along with avian flu mutations, and many other threats.
Chip what if it’s not Covid. If you can train dogs to deliver almost instantaneous screening for a future pandemic wouldn’t you be for doing that? Or are you so Covid obsessed that you can’t hold more than one thought in your head at once?
Chip: I think it’s both hilarious and tragic that the con response to Covid and the serious possibility of a pandemic recurring boils down to the “Wahhhh I don’t wanna” temper tantrums all parents are familiar with.
“Got scientific proof that viruses are contagious as claimed?”
Um, yes. (Or rather, overwhleming evidence supporting the claim–science doesn’t deal in “proof”).
“The Navy could not even prove it during the Spanish Flu with a large sample size….see The Rosenau Study….nobody got sick.”
LOL … this is hilarious! Rosenau administered Pfeiffer bacillus, which was widely but incorrectly thought to be the cause of the disease. Back in 1918 people had an excuse for not knowing the difference between a bacillus and a virus. Today in 2023 you don’t. And neither does anyone who believes a word said by someone as uninformed as yourself and unwilling to learn–as evidenced by the fact that you mention the Rosenau study but haven’t spent even 5 minutes looking into it.
See, a rational and intelligent person would conclude from the fact that Rosenau administered a large amount of … *something* directly into the mouths and noses of a large number of people and none of them got sick that *it was the wrong thing*. But no, not you … you conclude that “the virus isn’t contagious”. But if no one got sick from it then contagion doesn’t even come into the picture, so where did you come up with that? Oh, right … because Rosenau wanted to “determine the mode of spread of influenza”, wrongly thinking that he knew its cause. You figure that, not only wasn’t the virus contagious, but it didn’t even make anyone sick–pure genius you are! No one got sick because they were isolated on an island and given a harmless bacterium rather than the influenza virus … and if it doesn’t cause the disease then of course it’s not contagious.
Rosenau, NOT being an idiot, abstained from such conclusions: “We entered the outbreak with a notion that we knew the cause of the disease, and were quite sure we knew how it was transmitted from person to person. Perhaps, if we have learned anything, it is that we are not quite sure what we know about the disease.”
The mystery was solved in 1921 with the publication of “Influenza: An Epidemiologic Study” by
Warren T. Vaughan. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/idx/f/flu/0980flu.0016.890/2/–influenza-an-epidemiologic-study
No kidding. Give it a damn rest already.
Let me guess, Newsom and the school districts will try and have a dog stationed at schools and every kid will have to get sniffed if they want to go to school, sort of like going through the TSA. I can think of a couple people who would likely support that.
I’d think a real live Doctor would be interested/excited in the potential for using dogs to diagnose or do a quick screen for illness.
Ha, nah.
Depends how it’s used, thanks for asking though AlexB
This is very interesting to me. In early 2019 My wife and I adopted an 85 pound Akita/Pit mix female dog that was at the end of her rope. Towards the end of the year I was diagnosed with the C word. I had Chemo and radiation therapy for 6 weeks. Beat me down pretty good. I spent a lot of time on the couch watching Troy and the Gator hunters and anything else on History channel. My dog Sheba was next to me and on and in my lap constantly. A lot of love. In January I was deemed C free. But then a year of immunotherapy. Down again. Dog stayed tight. Now that it’s all over, Sheba doesn’t show that level of devotion anymore. Unless I have a pig ear for her. Ha!
Sac you must’ve missed POINT NUMBER 1 in the previous post: “1. $$…big money to be made. “
There’s your answer. We’ve seen this for the last few years. Lots of folks realize big pharma is a greedy bitch and only getting greedier. Some haven’t noticed it yet. All those TV, internet, and radio ads for ‘the next COVID’ shot. You must’ve noticed.
So Capt UCSB Doc, yoy saying covid was a hoax to make money for Big Pharma? What you getting at, Champ?
‘Off the rails’ stuff doesn’t work in healthcare, or anywhere else. I’d suggest you stop trying to argue.
Basicinfo805 Sep 02, 2023 07:19 AM
“Yeah, you guys are right – that was uncalled for. Lame comment on my part.I’ll try and stay on topic.”
viewed in an equation looks like this:
No valid data/information (ie. 0) * infinity (as many words as you’d like) = 0 (ie. TROLL)
… so you couldn’t even last ONE DAY with that? pfft…!
Keep drinking the Kool-Aid and do what The Man / Big Brother/ CDC/ W.H.O./ World Economic Forum in Davos TELLS us (Global RESET)… Controlled by Big Pharma, Blackrock, State Street, Vangard and the others who CONTROL your lives.