Many people yearn to return to normalcy after the restrictions imposed on them by the total and partial closures over the period of the Corona pandemic.

However, returning to normal life requires caution and caution, for fear of infection with the "SARS-CoV-2" virus that has not left us yet.

Detection dogs have the solution

Recently, a study published in the journal PLoS ONE on April 14th indicated that trained detection dogs may provide this kind of caution.

It can smell positive cases of "Covid-19" disease (COVID-19) that results from infection with the "SARS-CoV-2" virus.

The accuracy of its detection of positive cases was 96%.

Dogs need to recognize basic odor differences in order to accurately detect the scent of infection (pixabay)

According to the press release reported by the University of Pennsylvania, in response to the study published by its researchers at the College of Veterinary Medicine, senior study researcher Cynthia Otto says, "This is not an easy thing for dogs to do, as they have to be accurate in detecting the smell of infection." They must also distinguish the basic odor differences stemming from the differences between men and women, adults and children, as well as those of different races and geographical regions. "

Good training

The researchers discovered that dogs have the ability to distinguish between those smells, provided they are trained with great care on many samples.

Therefore, the researchers asked individuals who are positive with "Covid-19" disease, and others not infected with it, as well as from people who received a vaccine against the virus, to wear a "T-shirt" overnight, and then the team trained the dogs to smell the volatile organic compounds found in The clothes of those.

In order for the team to achieve a higher degree of detection accuracy, the team collected hundreds of clothing samples, in order to give dogs a greater opportunity to recognize individual differences between people.

A trained Labrador dog was able to distinguish positive and negative cases of corona (uric alart-pat nolan)

It is worth noting that the same team trained dogs in a previous similar experiment to identify ovarian cancer, except that in this study they used 8 "Labrador retrievers" and a single dog of the Belgian Malinois which was not used before. In any medical examination process.

First, the team trained the dogs to recognize a distinct odor, a synthetic substance known as a general detection compound.

The compound was placed in a wheel containing 12 samples of different scents, and the dog was rewarded if it recognized the outlet that contained the general detection compound without other odors in the wheel.

Uses in medical examination

When the dogs were able to constantly identify the general detection compound, the team began training them to sniff out urine samples from patients infected with SARS-CoV-2 -2, so that they could distinguish between positive and negative samples.

Note that the researchers inactivated the active virus in positive urine samples in order to be safe for dogs, and negative urine samples were also treated in the same way as positive samples, in order to standardize the factors in all samples.

After 3 weeks of training, the nine dogs were able to easily identify the positive samples with an accuracy of 96%.

Trained dogs may help track cases in public places (pixabay)

But it seems that there is something left in the samples of those who recovered from the disease, which complicated the matter for dogs and made them recognize the sample of the recovering person as a positive sample.

This means that the dogs were able to identify those infected or who were infected with the virus even if they were already cured, without being able to determine the current state of infection with the virus or not.

Thus, these efforts indicate the possibility of using well-trained dogs in the detection and identification of some medical diseases with great accuracy.

This may also give us a greater opportunity to explore cases of "Covid-19" disease in public places, if the countries of the world go back to normal again, which would save the time and effort needed to explore and track cases of infection in public places.