Experts are already preparing the animals to the training process that will last about six weeks. It is planned that this will be another additional feature to make a quick, and most importantly, non-invasive diagnosis in the period of the spread of a dangerous epidemic.
Informed employees of the charity has trained dogs to detect cancer, Parkinson’s disease, malaria and some bacterial infections, MINUGUA samples taken from the patients. In addition, animals can react to small changes of the temperature of the human body, which allows to determine the presence in humans of diseases, the main symptoms of which are fever or fever.
“In principle, we believe that dogs can identify COVID-19, — said the founder and Executive Director of the charity organization Medical Detection Dogs, Claire Guest. — At the moment we are trying to find a way that will allow us to safely catch the smell of the virus in patients, to show his animal. Our goal is to ensure that dogs could sniff out the infection, even for those people who have no pronounced symptoms.”
According to Claire Guest, this way not only will quickly, efficiently and non-invasively identify the presence of coronavirus, but will reduce the limited testing resources of the National health service UK (NHS – National Health Service) that they are used only in cases when it is really necessary.
Professor James Logan from the London school of hygiene and tropical medicine said that dogs can with extremely high accuracy to recognize the smell of people suffering from malaria. And, as other respiratory diseases have a feature to change body odor, there is a very high likelihood that this method can also work with COVID-19. According to experts, such a diagnostic tool could have a serious impact on the fight against the pandemic, not only in the short term, but in the long termOh term.
Professor Steve Lindsay from Durham University, added that if the study is successful, then people will be able to use dogs for the detection of coronavirus patients at airports, even when the epidemic will go on recession, and thus prevent its re-large-scale distribution.
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