HOW DOGS COULD OFFER HELP TO ERADICATE MALARIA

Steven Lindsay, a public health entomologist at Durham University in England, has been researching malaria control for decades. His preferred approach, he says, is to “sit on the boundaries,” drumming up ideas that others might not.

So it’s perhaps unsurprising that his latest project was inspired by the baggageclaim area at Dulles International Airport. If the beagles there could use their noses to detect explosives or contraband in suitcases, he wondered, could they also be trained to sniff out an intractable disease that kills more than 400,000 people each year?

Lindsay ended up tackling that question in a project that involved the dirty socks of hundreds of African children and a trio of sniffer dogs in England — and the answer strongly pointed to yes. The dogs correctly identified socks worn by malariainfected children 70 percent of the time and those worn by noninfected children 90 percent of the time.

“I think it is quite extraordinary,” said Lindsay, the lead scientist on a study being presented Monday at the annual meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. “We put these socks on African children for 12 hours, take them off, freeze them for 15 months before we start training, and then the dogs can pick up that odor.”

Lindsay and his colleagues gave nylon socks to nearly 600 children who had been tested for malaria in Gambia. Researchers ended up with 30 socks from asymptomatic malaria carriers and 145 socks from children who tested negative for the disease. — The Washington Post