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For some 15,000 years, dogs have been our hunting partners, workmates, helpers and companions. Could they also be our next allies in the fight against COVID-19?
According to UC Santa Barbara professor emeritus Tommy Dickey(link is external) and his collaborator, BioScent researcher Heather Junqueira, they can. And with a review paper(link is external) published in the
Journal of Osteopathic Medicine they have added to a small but growing consensus that trained medical scent dogs can effectively be used for screening individuals who may be infected with the COVID-19 virus.
This follows a comprehensive survey of research devoted to the use of trained scent dogs for detecting COVID. "The most striking result is that studies have already demonstrated that dogs can identify people who are COVID-19 positive," Dickey said of their findings. "Not only that," he added, "they can do it non-intrusively, more rapidly and with comparable or possibly better accuracy than our conventional detection tests."