Throughout the pandemic, and most notably in the months before there was a vaccine available, Americans and the world at large were fairly concerned about things like “asymptomatic spreaders” and the like.
And so we found ourselves taking invasive, sometimes painful COVID tests on a regular basis, as strangers continued to tickle our brains with their cotton swabs and indifference.
Now, just as we’re finding ourselves on the other end of the pandemic, we finally have ourselves a much more concise, and cute, way to detect the illness.
A study published on Monday found that people who are infected with coronavirus give off a distinct odour, which these highly trained dogs can detect with pinpoint precision.
Tala, a golden labrador in a red work jacket, greets me with a cursory sniff, before returning to his handler. I’m relieved to have passed the test, but feel a wet train of mucus on my hand where I petted him. This mucus fulfils an important purpose: dissolving odour molecules from the air and transporting them to olfactory receptors in the top of their nose, where the magic happens. Whereas humans have about 5m of these receptors, dogs have up to 300m.
Dr Claire Guest has always been fascinated by dogs, and humans’ relationship with them. After studying psychology, she worked for Hearing Dogs for Deaf People, where she met a woman who said her pet dalmatian had diagnosed a malignant melanoma on her calf. “She kept saying, ‘The dog sniffed it,’” Guest recalled. In 2002, Guest joined forces with an orthopaedic surgeon, John Church, to test whether dogs could be trained to distinguish between urine from healthy people and those with bladder cancer. The research, published in the BMJ, showed that they could.
And, as for which dogs do the best job at detecting COVID, the clear winners are labs, retrievers, and spaniels, all of whom revel in having such a job.
