Latin America’s police dogs have a mission: Sniff out Covid
XALAPA, MEXICO: Their highly superior sense of smell has long been used to sniff out drugs, weapons and dead bodies. Now Latin America’s crime-fighting police dogs are being trained to detect Covid-19.
In El Salvador, police are using artificial aromas similar to the sweat of a person infected with the coronavirus to train dogs. “It’s not so easy, because the Covid-19 strains seem to be changing a lot,” said Wilber Alarcon, a canine handler from the Central American nation’s anti-narcotics police.
Alarcon expects Covid-19 sniffer dogs to soon be patrolling airports, bus terminals and border posts in his country, one of seven to attend the drills in Mexico’s eastern state of Veracruz.
Studies have suggested that dogs can detect the virus even in asymptomatic patients.
In Mexico’s northwestern state of Sonora, state and private organisations already have six dogs in operation and are training about 30 to detect the coronavirus, Juan Mancillas, head of Canines Against Covid, said.
They include breeds such as Golden Retrievers, Labradors,
German Shepherds and Belgian Shepherds.
Similar programmes are being carried out elsewhere in the region in response to the pandemic. In Chile, a squad from the Police Canine Training School has been deployed in Santiago. In Europe, Czech trainers have reported a 95% success rate in Covid-19 detection in samples of human scent by dogs.
In Britain, the charity Medical Detection Dogs is also hoping to harness the power of canine noses. And in Miami, dogs have been deployed to sniff out Covid-19 infections among fans going to watch basketball.