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An instructor poses with his sniffer dog during an experimental training protocol to detect Covid-19 through sweat at the Campus Bio-Medico University Hospital in Rome on March 31. AFP
Italian dogs training to sniff out Covid-19
Mon, 5 April 2021
It was Harlock’s first day at coronavirus training school and she already showed promise.
The one-year-old German Shepherd’s task on the morning of March 31 was simply to place her slightly wet nose on a black tube.
“Sniff,” encouraged her trainer, Massimiliano Macera, who was quick to reward his furry student with treats whenever nose met tube.
“She’s already got it!” he added, smiling at his protege, part of a team of dogs learning how to sniff out Covid-19.
A medical team in Rome teaches dogs to recognise Covid-19 samples, with the hope of using the canines for mass-testing in the future. The project, which began 10 days ago at Rome's Campus Bio-Medico University Hospital, envisions training dogs to detect the presence of the coronavirus in human sweat. Covid dog trials have taken place in Finland, Germany, France and the United Arab Emirates, among others, over the past year, although such testing has not yet been adopted more widely, in part due to a lack of peer-reviewed literature.
Dogs can smell things really well. No, really, really well. We’ve known that for a long time. Dogs’ noses have roughly 300 million scent receptors – which
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