THE DOGS WHO COULD SAVE YOUR LIFE
After her breast cancer battle, ex-Tory leader’s wife Betsy Duncan Smith heard of dogs’ ability to detect her illness. Now, in a medical revolution, they’re learning to sniff out prostate cancer and diabetes
JOBI is an endearing black cocker spaniel; intelligent and sociable, he wiggles with delight when he greets people and sniffs them appraisingly with his sharp, questing nose.
He lives with Betsy Duncan Smith and her husband, former Tory party leader Iain, in a farmhouse with chickens, ducks and guinea fowl foraging in its garden. But Jobi is far more than a pet. In fact he does a vital, and potentially life-saving, job.
‘Every day I drop him at work,’ explains Betsy. ‘It’s a bit like the school run. He arrives at 9am, then I collect him in the afternoon.
‘He loves his job and when he comes home he’s ready to put his feet up. He has his own chair by the radiator,’ she smiles. ‘He’s such a sweet dog and as soon as Iain saw him he said: “Can we have him?” ’
Lovable he may be, but Jobi is also resourceful and driven; his specific skill has been honed and harnessed by expert trainers. He is a bio-detection dog; his task is to sniff out prostate cancer in its early stages from urine samples. One of 23 recruits — each with finely-tuned olfactory powers — Jobi works with an extraordinary little charity, Medical Detection Dogs (MDD).
‘All diseases cause biochemical changes in our bodies that produce different smells which the body excretes in various ways,’ says Betsy. ‘And every disease has its own distinctive odour that dogs can be trained to recognise and detect at very low concentrations — the equivalent of a couple of drops in an Olympic-sized swimming pool.
‘They can also discern the smells very early in the progress of the disease, which is crucial because early detection is the key to survival.
‘Dogs have 300 million sensory receptors in their noses, while humans have just five million. Yet we’ve been so slow to recognise their potential. We’ve used them as guide dogs for the blind, but it’s their sense of smell that’s exceptional. They can beat any cancer detection device. And they’re much cheaper.’
BETSY, 58, heard about the charity that she is now a trustee of after breast cancer — detected too late to spare her a succession of gruelling operations — floored her for two years.
‘The changes happened very slowly,’ she remembers. ‘I should have picked up on them sooner. I’d noticed one of my nipples was changing, retracting a bit. I’d actually taken my son Harry (she and Iain have four children) to the doctors in July 2009 because he was having trouble with his shoulder.
‘While I was there I asked the doctor to take a look at my breast. He examined me, found a lump and referred me to hospital immediately. After that, it all happened rather quickly. I remember feeling disbelief. You don’t think you’ll get cancer if you’re fit and energetic, do you?
‘I rang Iain [in his office at Westminster] and I was very much in a state of denial. I said: “The doctor says I have to go to hospital tomorrow, but you don’t need to come. Don’t worry.” And he said: “I jolly well will be coming.”
‘I’m not weepy. I just grit my teeth and get on with it. And I think Iain must have had a word with the Whips’ Office and said “I need to be at home with my wife”, because from then on he moved his office from Parliament for six months and worked from home.
‘He was incredible. He had to do everything for me because I reacted very badly to the chemo. There were some very low moments. I couldn’t move or talk on occasions, and I had a little bell by my bed I rang when I wanted him.
‘He had to bathe me, take me to the loo, cook for me — but he likes cooking.’ She smiles.
A grade-two tumour — the most severe is grade four — had been diagnosed. It had been there for 12-18 months but I hadn’t felt a lump. It was quite spongy, not sticking out,’ she remembers.
At the time, Betsy had three dogs but she shared a special bond with her little collie, Biggar. ‘I adored him and I’m sure, looking back, he would have tried to warn me about the cancer. He was very intelligent. I’m certain he jumped up and nudged me, but at the time I wasn’t tuned in to what he was trying to do.’
There are countless stories of dogs noting unfamiliar smells emanating from their owners and warning them by nuzzling or pawing the affected area.
Indeed, Dr Claire Guest, CEO of MDD, was alerted to her breast cancer by her dog Daisy, who was awarded the Blue Cross Medal for her achievement as a cancer detection dog.
Claire recalls: ‘Daisy was behaving strangely, warily. She kept staring me in the face and nudging my chest. I thought I could feel a lump which she’d been pawing.
‘I had it checked out and there was a very deep-seated cancer. I had surgery quickly and I’m here to tell the tale.’
A year earlier, in 2008, Claire had co-founded the charity with Dr John Church, a former orthopaedic surgeon.
For Betsy, detection came relatively late, by which time the tumour had spread. Within the space of a couple of years she’d had four operations: her lymph nodes were removed, she had a lumpectomy, and, when that failed to excise the cancer, a mastectomy. Finally, a year later, in 2011, she underwent reconstructive surgery.
‘I had chemotherapy to try to shrink the tumour, which had spread like a spider’s web,’ she recalls. ‘And I remember feeling my energy going, to the point where I couldn’t move.
‘I know of people who are just a bit sick with chemo, then go back to work, but I reacted badly. The first shot put me back in hospital. I couldn’t speak; I tried desperately to communicate by raising my thumb.
‘I felt very low but gradually you build back up just in time to be whacked down again by the next session. It must have been difficult for Iain and the children to see me so wiped out, but they’d all sit round my bed at home and make me laugh.
‘ My hair fell out but that was absolutely the least of my problems. I just wore a little cashmere hat that a dear friend had knitted.
‘But the treatment seemed to go on for ever and I couldn’t get back on my perch. You think: “I’ll have the chemo and then it will be fine”, but it wasn’t because I needed a lumpectomy, and then a mastectomy, and I just can’t tell you how much I didn’t want that.’
SHE explains: ‘ Some people are relieved to have a mastectomy because they reason they’re getting rid of the cancer with their breast.
‘Yet to me it was traumatic. To lose a part of your body seemed to go against all my instincts about not interfering with nature. I don’t even have pierced ears!
‘But I was told I had no option. I had to have my right breast removed or I’d be in trouble. I don’t remember being weepy; neither was Iain. But he was worried. Absolutely. And I think he was angry with himself. He felt he should have spotted the problem.’
During his wife’s illness, in 2010, Iain Duncan Smith, 63, known as IDS, a staunch Brexiteer and the self- styled ‘quiet man’ of UK politics, was pushing through Parliament plans for extensive welfare reforms.
He has said little about his wife’s illness — only that news of it ‘took my breath away’ — but his devotion was manifest in the efficient practicality with which he cared for her. They have now been married for 35 years.
Betsy may look like the archetypal Tory wife — she is pretty, fine-boned and neatly accoutred in tweed jacket, black trousers and discreet jewellery — but she assures me she’s much happier pottering around her garden in ‘grotty trousers and comfy shoes’.
Iain, she says, ‘always used to take the children clothes shopping while I’d read Practical Poultry magazine while they chose what they wanted’.
Their daughter Alicia, 28, a fashion designer, has inherited her passion for clothes from her dad. Edward, 30, is a barrister; Harry, 26, works in the film
industry; and Rosie, 24, teaches english in Japan.
Betsy is from aristocratic stock — her father, Lord Cottesloe, a former Royal Navy Commander, is descended from Admiral sir Thomas Fremantle, who served at Trafalgar — and her delicate frame belies physical toughness: before she became ill, she kept 50 pigs and was a vigorous, hands-on gardener.
her illness floored her, but also made her think of those less fortunate. ‘i was so lucky to have iain looking after me during the chemo,’ she says.
Their children were old enough to be self-sufficient at the time, and she says: ‘i remember thinking: “how would a mum with young children cope, getting them fed, dressed and off to school when they felt so grim?” ’
she recalls iain’s caring nursing: ‘he would lift me out of bed and take me downstairs, even if i was just lying on the sofa. As i got stronger i tried to go out, even if only for a walk.
‘When he couldn’t be with me, family stepped in. i once went for a walk with my sister and she remembers that my steps got smaller and smaller until eventually my legs buckled and i passed out on the floor. she was able to ring for help, but what would happen if you were alone?’
Again she is concerned for others who might not be supported as she was — which brings us back to the charity. it also trains medical assistance dogs — so far 100 have graduated — which help people with life-threatening conditions, giving them greater independence (and also saving Nhs resources).
Their intelligent noses, again, are Devoted: Betsy Duncan Smith with detection dogs including Jobi (second left) and, far left, with her politician husband Iain crucial: they help, among many others, people with type 1 diabetes, recognising, for example, the smell that signals a slump in blood sugar levels that could precede a coma. The dog warns its owner before the symptoms overcome them.
Betsy recalls how she first became involved with the charity, shortly after her cancer treatment had ended in 2011. ‘A friend said: “You must come and see what this little charity does,” and i thought: “Absolutely no way.” i didn’t want to get involved with anything to do with cancer. But she persuaded me, and i was blown away. i just thought: “i have to help.”
‘And i hoiked iain along too, and he’s been involved in fundraising since. he loves dogs too, and the first time he came and saw Jobi he was smitten.
‘There’s so much potential. so much the dogs can do. We only need to ask them, really.’
each dog has its own area of expertise. spaniels Asher and Freya can detect malaria. Freya is a lively rescue dog and we watch as, under strict laboratory conditions, she repeatedly sniffs out correctly a portion of sock worn by an African child with the disease, ignoring all the socks that aren’t imbued with the odour.
THEN there are labradors Lucy and Daisy, both expert at sniffing out urological cancers, while others are being trained to recognise early-stage Parkinson’s disease. New research is also revealing that dogs have the ability to smell specific bacteria very reliably.
And they offer not only a cheap, swift method of diagnosis, but also, trials show, a more accurate one than traditional, more invasive and time- consuming tests. Conventional prostate cancer tests, for example, have a false-positive rate of 75 per cent, while dogs have proved to be 93 per cent accurate.
‘We can save so many lives,’ says Betsy. ‘ Dogs aren’t just wet noses and waggy tails. They’re the most sophisticated bio-sensors on earth.’
her mission to help others is, undoubtedly, fired by her own experience. she looks well, but admits: ‘To this day i don’t quite have a full tank. i still take [the drug] tamoxifen which makes me feel a little bit creaky, but i’ve got most of my old energy back.
‘And i don’t ever worry about cancer because there are so many other things to do with my time. The charity takes a lot of it, but i’m passionate about it. i can’t think of anything i could do that would be more important.
‘it could have saved me going through four operations and it can save many other people by diagnosing them early.
‘if at the end of my life i’ve helped move it on, it’s the best thing i could ever do.’
MEDICAL Detection Dogs relies totally on charitable donations. To help, go to medicaldetectiondogs.org.uk