SNIFFER DOGS: UK’S PROJECT TO TACKLE COVID

UK hopes to develop a new weapon in the global war against the coronavirus pandemic: Covid-19 sniffer dogs.

A £500,000 ($605,000) 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 coronavirus before symptoms even appear, the department for health and social care said on Saturday.

Researchers at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and Durham University, and the 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.

For the initial phase of the trial, National Health Service staff in London hospitals will collect odour samples from people infected with coronavirus and those who are uninfected, and six dogs will be trained to recognise the virus from the samples. The animals could each screen 250 people per hour, according to the department.

It said that dogs can be trained to detect the odour of disease at the equivalent dilution of one teaspoon of sugar in two Olympic-sized swimming pools of water.

As the World Health Organization (WHO) prepares to host its main annual meeting next week, fears abound that Us-china tensions could hamper the strong action needed to address the Covid-19 pandemic crisis.

The United Nations health agency, which for months has been consumed by the towering task of trying to coordinate a global response to the novel coronavirus pandemic, will for the first time invite health ministers and other dignitaries to participate virtually in its annual meet.

The World Health Assembly, which has been trimmed from the usual three weeks to just two days, on Monday and Tuesday, is expected to focus almost solely on Covid-19, which in a matter of months has killed more than 300,000 globally, and infected nearly 4.5 million. WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Friday the event would be “one of the most important (WHAS) since we were founded in 1948”.

But the chance of reaching agreement on global measures to address the crisis could be threatened by steadily deteriorating relations between the world’s two largest economies over the pandemic. Despite the tensions, countries hope to adopt by consensus a resolution urging a joint response to the pandemic.