Canadian dogs used as tool to screen for cancer
Jim O’Malley took a major step earlier this year. After almost 24 months either off sick or on light duty, the Chicago fire department veteran returned to battling the city’s blazes.
O’Malley gives much of the credit to a Canadian company’s extraordinary project, which he’s convinced not only helped him get back to work, but might have saved his life.
From its rural base in Aylmer, Que., Cancer Dogs has been screening thousands of American firefighters like him for cancer — using canine noses.
When the Canadian hounds detected the scent of malignancy in a breath sample O’Malley provided — despite his lack of symptoms — he battled his doctors’ doubts, underwent a colonoscopy and discovered he had rectal cancer.
It was stage two, still treatable, and now he’s healthy again.
“Had I not done the dog screening, I truly believe I would not have had the colonoscopy,” he says. “I would have waited a year, two years, who knows? … I was lucky to find it early.”
O’Malley, 52, is the poster child for a curious Canadian health-care export that has been embraced by many of America’s first responders, but left scientists skeptical and worried about inadvertent harms.
It appears to be a classic case, some cancer physicians say, of medical entrepreneurship surging ahead of the actual medical evidence.
“It’s a very appealing story,” says Dr. Leonard Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society. “But stories don’t make good medicine.”
YOU SEE A GUY WHO’S TELLING YOU ‘I GOT TESTED BY A DOG AND THEY FOUND MY CANCER’ AND PEOPLE START LISTENING. — MIKE BUTKUS, CHICAGO FIREFIGHTER IT’S THE KIND OF THING THAT’S GOING TO SAVE THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS OF LIVES.
Even so, 50 fire department unions across the U.S. have followed Chicago’s lead and are working with CancerDogs, with 40,000 men and women screened, at $20 each.
Glenn Ferguson, the firm’s co-owner, says the science is plenty solid, and insists his cancer finds are accurate 60 to 70 per cent of the time, helping people get treatment early or take preventive measures.
The idea that dogs can pick up odours signifying someone has cancer is certainly far from hokum. A number of small “proof-ofconcept” studies have suggested the animals can detect cancers in breath samples or urine with remarkable accuracy. The most common theory is they smell chemical byproducts of the cancer cells’ metabolism, probably “volatile organic compounds.”
Ferguson, who runs CancerDogs with his wife, first learned about the concept from a BBC documentary, and couldn’t see why it wasn’t being rolled out as a screening tool that could help real people.
“It is a disgrace, it is an absolute disgrace that this thing isn’t being grabbed onto like the invention of radar,” he says. “It’s the kind of thing that’s going to save thousands and thousands of lives.”
Well-studied screening methods are already available for cancers like breast, colorectal and prostate, ideally enabling some people to start treatment when it has a better chance of success.
But they can be controversial, and Ferguson notes that certain other malignancies, such as ovarian and pancreas, are typically only found at a late, often terminal stage.
Five years ago, he set out to use dogs to fill that gap, despite an unrelated background in advertising and graphic design and, more recently, teaching kayaking.
Ferguson trained four beagle-hound mixes to identify cancer’s smell, using samples collected from patients who had yet to undergo treatment.
CancerDogs eventually decided to focus on servicing firefighters’ unions — well-organized groups whose members are at somewhat heightened risk of getting cancer. The clients now range from California to Texas and Oklahoma. No Canadian firefighters have followed suit.
The professionals — and often family members — put on a surgical mask, wait 10 minutes and then slip it into a sealable pouch and send it to Aylmer.
Samples are arrayed on trays for the dogs to sniff; when they think they detect cancer, they put a paw over the sample. If a majority of dogs identify something, the person is asked to submit another sample; if the result is duplicated, the test is considered positive.
What happens then is a little more complicated, since the result — or so Ferguson contends — only suggests that someone has cancer, not where it might be. He recommends they get examined for skin cancer — the most common type of malignancy — and undergo a blood test called OncoBlot.
OncoBlot’s developers claim it can not only find cancer, but identify 25 specific types. It has not been approved by U.S. regulators, though, and only two small studies have been published suggesting it might work. Its own website says cancer screening “is not an approved utility” of the test.
Still, CancerDogs is measuring its success partly against OncoBlot results.
In Chicago in 2016, for instance, the dogs detected possible cancer in 129 of 700 firefighters and family members screened. Of those, 16 have since been diagnosed with cancer and three with precancerous lesions.
But only 17 got the $650 OncoBlot. Had they all done so — based on the dogs’ track record — the blood test would likely have uncovered another 62 cases, Ferguson argues.
Kip Smith, a retired firefighter from Euless, Tex., says he found out last year he had inoperable pancreatic cancer after a positive CancerDogs screen.
In Plano, Tex., Fire Chief Sam Greif ordered an OncoBlot after his Canadian dog test came back positive, the blood screen suggesting he had lung cancer. Various scans have yet to find any sign of a tumour, but Greif says he ‘s convinced it’s there at a very early stage. So he adopted a healthier diet and is taking a natural supplement — developed by the people behind OncoBlot.
“It is a little spooky, because you can’t help but wonder ‘When is it going to bloom, or is it going to bloom?’ ” he says. Experts are doubtful. The preliminary research suggests dogs definitely do have an amazing ability to perceive disease, says Lichtenfeld of the American Cancer Society. But the process involves numerous variables — including how breath samples are collected and dogs trained — and there simply have been no large-scale, rigorous trials that show the sniffing would be a reliable mass-screening technique, he said.
Meanwhile in Chicago, chief steward Mike Butkus of the firefighters union has heard the criticism — and his faith in CancerDogs remains unshaken.
“You see a guy who’s telling you ‘I got tested by a dog and they found my cancer,’ he says, “and people start listening.”