Lifesaving dogs for diabetics

MEDICAL ALERT: HELP FOR PATIENTS

Trained to paw on detecting body odour of low or high sugar.

Dogs are famous for their sense of smell and in South Africa, for the first time, that is being used to save lives of people battling a chronic condition.

Honey’s Garden, a non-profit organisation in Cape Town headed by Lucy Breytenbach, is training dogs to become medical alert assistance dogs for type 1 diabetics.

Type 1 diabetes is a complex chronic condition that usually strikes before the age of 35. Not to be confused with the more common type 2 diabetes, it can wreak havoc on the lives of those trying to manage it.

The body attacks the insulin-producing cells which regulate sugar levels in the pancreas. Diabetics can no longer produce insulin and will die without it. They must therefore inject a synthetic insulin or wear an insulin pump which releases insulin through a canula placed subcutaneously.

Sugar highs, hyperglycemia, and sugar lows, hypoglycaemia, are the everyday occurences diabetics contend with. Both can be life threatening.

Enter highly trained, medical heroes – dogs who can sniff out an odour undetectable by humans. The body releases chemicals during a hypoglycemic or hyperglycemic episode, and it is this smell that a trained medical alert dog picks up.

Honey’s Garden, one of only two organisations in South Africa training medical alert dogs, says its training process positively motivates these dogs to alert, either by pawing or nudging, when these odours are detected. So far they have trained and placed 10 dogs with diabetics and are training another eight dogs. The training costs R100 000 per dog, but Breytenbach says clients are charged half of that at R50 000 and the dogs take about a year to train.

“We take saliva samples from the diabetics (when sugar levels go too high or too low), and we imprint the dogs on that scent, we teach them to give a signal when they detect that scent. We then work with them in different environments so they are able to detect the scent even when they are distracted.”

“Dogs alert the mother when the child goes low. One dog alerted six times in one week and woke the mother up during the night,” Breytenbach says. – ANA