6 Doggos Trained To Sniff Out COVID-19 Asymptomatic Patients For Thailand Airports
When a dog detects the virus, it will immediately sit down.
By Tamara Jayne — 18 Mar 2021, 09:55 AM
Six Labrador Retrievers have been recently trained in Thailand to detect COVID-19 simply by doing what dogs do best – by sniffing
Chulalongkorn Veterinary Faculty revealed that the six-month project has proven to be 95% accurate.
Chula News reported that the dogs are even able to sniff out asymptomatic individuals (patients who show no symptoms).
The head of the project Professor Kewali Chatdarong explained that dogs' sense of smell is 50 times better than humans, so they decided to conduct tests to see if they could use this to their advantage.
The dogs do not need to sniff people directly, but can just sniff samples of human sweat and be able to detect the virus within seconds
Kewali revealed that when a dog sniffs a sample that contains COVID-19, it will immediately sit down.
During training, the Labrador Retrievers were released to detect an infected patient's sweat among a spinning wheelset of six cans.
The researchers confirmed that the entire process is completely safe for the dogs.
The six sniffers will be put out on the field at airports and ports where there are many commuters, as it will be a quicker method to detect the virus instead of temperature checks
Kewali told Reuters that it only takes the dog one to two seconds to detect the virus.
The professor also added that they hope to train more dogs in the future to be able to detect health issues, such as diabetes, depression, malaria, and Alzheimer's disease.
Similarly, in countries such as Finland, Germany, France, and Australia, Reuters reported that dogs have been trained to detect the virus with an accuracy of 94%.
