France Sees Success Training Dogs To Detect Coronavirus

Story By: Joseph GolderSub-EditorJoseph Golder, Agency: Newsflash

A veterinary school in France has launched a special programme to train dogs to detect coronavirus on infected people after early research revealed that dogs can smell the virus.

The Maison-Alfort veterinary school says that the first major phase, during which police and firefighter dogs need to show they can single out the smell of coronavirus, is a success and now they can go on to the next phase that involves dogs being able to tell if a single sample is infected with the deadly virus or not.

Dogs have a very developed and sensitive sense of smell that enables them to detect the odours of various types of cancer, and now it appears that dogs trained to detect explosives or drugs can also be trained to smell the coronavirus on infected people.

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Dominique Grandjean, a professor at the French national veterinary school of Maison-Alfort, speaking about the results of the first tests, said: “We now do sessions that are really amazing where we have a 100-percent [successful detection rate]. It works, that’s clear. The dog can find the positives among the negatives or the blanks. Today, we can say this.”

At the end of March, the British association Medical Detection Dogs explained that it was working with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and the University of Durham to use dogs to detect cases of COVID-19.

The United Kingdom also announced that using dogs would be like “a new potential non-invasive early warning measure to detect coronaviruses in the future”.

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In France, professor Grandjean from the veterinary school in Maison-Alfort, which is in the Ile-de-France department, near Paris, also launched a similar study in late April, using about 20 firefighter and police dogs.

Several weeks later, these tests appear to have paid off, in France as well as across the Channel in the United Kingdom.

Put in regular contact with the sweat of positive test patients, dogs are now able to differentiate between the sweat of a healthy person and that of an infected person.

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Now the French study’s second phase can go ahead. Grandjean says that it will be a question of seeing whether the dog “marks, barks, or sits when it is positive” when provided with a single sample.

In the UK, the second part of their study is also set to begin, according to the co-founder and CEO of Medical Detection Dogs, Dr Claire Guest.

This new test phase will make it possible to assess the behaviour of trained canines in real situations this time. Guest said: “After which we hope to work with other agencies to train more dogs.”

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She thinks that once they are fully trained, COVID-19 detection dogs will be able to screen up to 750 people in an hour, even if they are asymptomatic.

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