A loyal friend of man helps him in his war against Corona

Dr.. Osama Abu Al-Rub

The world is having trouble diagnosing the emerging SARS Cove 2 virus that causes Covid-19 رض, but the help may be from an unexpected source: dogs!

To date, global HIV infection has exceeded 4.8 million, including more than 316,000 deaths, according to WorldMeter.

However, the number of recorded cases reflects only a small part of the actual number of injuries due to the disparity in the diagnostic policy pursued by each country, as many of them are only examined for cases that require hospital care.

The British Ministry of Health announced that it intends to conduct a study to find out whether dogs are able to detect infections of the Coronavirus before the symptoms appear on the infected person.

According to medical scientific research, dogs have odor receptors more than one hundred thousand to a million times more than humans. The dogs also have between 200 and 250 million cells for the sense of smell, while not more than five million in humans.

A statement issued by the British Ministry of Health said on Saturday that it will undergo special dogs for training, as it will be part of a study on the virus.

The statement indicated that the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, University of Durham and the Dog Diagnostic Medical Research Center will participate in the study. He added that the British government will finance this study with half a million pounds (about 607 thousand dollars).

The study will examine whether dogs that can detect diseases such as cancer, malaria, and Parkinson's are able to detect corona virus in humans from odor samples, even if symptoms of the disease do not appear on them.

In the first phase of the study, samples of the smells of people carrying the emerging corona virus will be collected, and 6 dogs will undergo comprehensive training to identify the smell of the virus.

If the dogs succeed in identifying the virus, they will be used to combat corona.

Other diseases
The dogs are extremely sensitive to discovering odors during efforts to combat other diseases as well, as the British authorities agreed - earlier - to conduct experiments to train dogs to detect prostate and bowel cancer by smelling them in urine.

Here we present some research that examined the use of dogs' olfactory abilities in diagnosing diseases:

Breast cancer
in 2019 A French medical team at the Institut "Marie Keri" in Paris confirmed that it had reached very promising results in detecting breast cancer, based on the strong sense of smell that dogs have.

The scientists said that their findings will quickly help doctors in the future to pre-detect the breast cancer tumor, especially when it is in its early stages.

And the method that the researchers adopted was to give the dog several fabrics of garment that contain different smells, including a piece of clothing dampened in the patient's sweat. With a cancer patient.

The principle depends on the fact that each cancerous tumor has a special smell, and no matter how weak this smell is, dogs reveal it.

Malaria
in 2018 scientists in Britain worked with dogs to diagnose malaria, in a medical study at the British University of Durham.

Flasks were provided for dogs, containing pieces of socks, one of which was for a child with malaria. Dogs were able to distinguish between socks for children with malaria and children without socks.

Researchers believe that the scent emitted by the malaria parasite attracts the law that spreads the disease.

Prostate cancer
In 2015, Italian scientists announced that they used trained dogs to detect prostate cancer, and they were able to detect hundreds of men with the disease with accuracy of 98%.

The researchers at the Department of Urology at the "Humanitas" Center for Clinical Research in the Italian city of Milan, that two trained dogs were able to detect the injury of hundreds of men with prostate cancer by smelling their urine samples.

The two dogs were able to recognize patients by smelling specific chemicals in the urine linked to prostate cancer, one of the most common cancers among men around the world.