Dogs are good sniffers and used for hunting out explosives, drugs, contraband materials and many things. And now dogs are trained to sniff out coronavirus victims earlier. Medical Detection Dogs, a charity in the United Kingdom, along with Durham University and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine have envisaged a programme to train dogs in detecting coronavirus well in advance.
The charity is already doing research in cancer and diabetes. The charity already used dogs for detecting cancer, Parkinson’s and other infections. The Medical Detection Dogs said that the dogs could be trained for detecting coronavirus, a report said.
It said that the dogs have the ability to detect temperature and could say if a person is having fever or not. The trained dogs could be used to identify infected travellers who enter the country.
The charity expressed hope that the dogs once trained could detect coronavirus infection. The charity personnel said that that they were now looking into how to safely catch the odour of the virus from patients and present it to dogs.
The Medical Detection Dogs said that the dogs have proved to be good at detecting smell from humans infected with malaria. They assume that infected persons would have a different body odour. And a trained dog could detect.
