Chilean police train dogs to sniff out Covid-19
Police in Chile are training dogs to identify people which may be infected with the novel coronavirus by sniffing their sweat.
The dogs - three golden retrievers and a labrador - are between your ages of four and five. As yet they have already been used to sniff out illicit drugs, explosives and lost people, police say.
The training program is a joint effort by Chile's national police, the Carabineros, and experts at the Universidad Catolica de Chile.
It follows in the footsteps of similar efforts taking place in France, said Julio Santelices, head of the police school of specialties.
Dogs have 330 million olfactory receptors, and an capability to identify smells 50 times much better than humans. They can also smell 250 persons per hour.
"The virus has no smell, but instead the infection generates metabolic changes" which in turn leads to the release of a specific kind of sweat "which is what your dog would detect," Fernando Mardones, a Universidad Catolica professor of veterinary epidemiology, told AFP.
According to Santelices, tests in Europe and Dubai displayed a 95 percent efficiency rate in canine detection of COVID-19 cases.
Medical Detection Dogs, a British charity setup in 2008 to harness dogs' sharp sense of smell to identify human diseases, also started training canines to find COVID-19 in late March.
"The need for this study is that it'll allow dogs to be biodetectors, and detect this sort of illness at an early stage," Santelices told AFP.
Mardones said that there surely is already evidence that dogs can find diseases such as tuberculosis, parasite infections, and even early stages of cancer.
Canines can detect subtle changes in skin temperature, potentially making them useful in determining if one has a fever.
According to the World Organisation for Animal Health, the likelihood of contagion from a dog is remote.
The canine trainees commenced their education one month ago, and will use sweat samples taken from COVID-19 patients being treated at the Universidad Catolica's clinic.
The experts hope to have the dogs trained and employed in the field by August.
The program is to deploy them with an officer in pedestrian-heavy areas such as for example train stations and airports, and at health control stations.
Chile on Tuesday reported 1,836 new cases of COVID-19 - the cheapest figure in two months - bringing the full total of cases since March 3 to 319,493.
The viral infection has killed a lot more than 11,000 people, based on the latest Health Ministry official report, which include "probable" COVID-19 victims.--AFP
