COVID SNIFFER DOGS: BRITAIN’S NEW MISSION TO FIGHT PANDEMIC

LONDON: The UK hopes to develop a new weapon in the war against the coronavirus: Covid-19 sniffer dogs. A £500,000 government programme to find new ways of fighting the pandemic that’s gripped the nation since March will back clinical trials to train dogs to see if they can spot the coronavirus before symptoms even appear, the department for health and social care said on Saturday.

Researchers at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and Durham University, and charity group Medical Detection Dogs will conduct the trials.

Dogs have been trained to detect certain cancers, and if they could be used to detect this virus in asymptomatic people, they could serve as an “early warning measure,” the department said. The dogs used will be a mixture of Labradors and Cocker Spaniels. A total of six dogs will be trained to recognise the virus from odour samples collected from infected and uninfected people.