Daily Breeze (Torrance)

COVID-19-sniffing dogs accurate but face hurdles

- By James Gorman

NEW YORK » Dog noses are great COVID-19 detectors, according to numerous laboratory studies, and COVID-19-sniffing dogs already have started working in airports in other countries and at a few events in the United States, like a Miami Heat basketball game.

But some experts in public health and in training scent dogs say that more informatio­n and planning are needed to be certain they are accurate in real life situations.

“There are no national standards” for scent dogs, according to Cynthia Otto, director of the Penn Vet Working Dog Center at the University of Pennsylvan­ia School of Veterinary Medicine and one of the authors of a new paper on scent dog use in COVID detection.

And although private groups certify drug-sniffing and bomb and rescue dogs, similar programs for medical detection do not exist, according to the new paper in the journal Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedne­ss.

Lois Privor-Dumm, a public health researcher at Johns Hopkins University and the senior author of the paper, said there was no question that dogs have great potential in medical fields. But she wants to explore how they could be deployed on a large scale, such as by the government.

“What are all the ethical considerat­ions? What are the regulatory considerat­ions? How practical is this?” she asked. Not only the quality of detection but logistics and cost would be central to any widespread applicatio­n, as with any public health interventi­on.

Quality control is a first step, and a large one. Medical

scent detection is more complicate­d than drug or bomb detection, Otto said. A dog working an airport for drugs or explosive detection has a consistent context and a fairly straightfo­rward target odor. In COVID-19 detection, researcher­s know that the dogs can distinguis­h an infected person’s sweat or urine. But they don’t know what chemicals the dog is identifyin­g.

Human scents vary

Because human scents vary, medical detection dogs have to be trained on many different people. “We have all of the ethnicitie­s and ages and diets and all of these things that make human smell,” Otto said.

The symptoms of many medical conditions are similar to those of COVID-19, and dogs that detect scents associated with fever or pneumonia would be ineffectiv­e. So the human subjects used in training dogs, Otto said, must include “lots of people that are negative, but might have a cough or might have a fever or other things.” If the dogs mistook flu for COVID-19, that obviously would be a crucial mistake.

Also, dogs can be trained on sweat, or saliva or urine. In the United Arab Emirates, the dogs worked with urine samples. In Miami, they just walked along a line of people.

Any positive cases of COVID-19 infection that the dogs detect are usually confirmed with what is now the gold standard for confirming the presence of the coronaviru­s, a PCR test. A review of research published recently concluded, however, that dogs performed better than the test.

But these are experiment­al results. Dogs do well in detecting explosives and other substances at a distance, but so far Otto said she was not aware of published research attesting to the accuracy of dogs sniffing people in a line rather than urine or sweat.

If the government were to conduct or approve dogs for virus detection in an official way, some standards would have to be establishe­d on how dogs should be trained and how their performanc­e should be evaluated. Otto is on a committee at the National Institute of Standards and Technology now meeting to develop standards for scent detection dogs in a variety of situations, including detection of COVID-19.

She said that even if standards are clearly set, finding enough dogs to conduct widespread scent detection is another hurdle. Trained dogs are not easy to come by. “We have a shortage of dogs in this country for bomb detection. We’ve been dealing with that for years,” she said.

Dogs can be retrained from one scent to another, but that itself can be tricky. “Some countries are actually taking their dogs that are trained on bombs and training them on COVID. But you know, all you have to do is think about at an airport, if you have a dog that sniffs both COVID and bombs and they alert, what do you have?”

Expensive dogs

Well-trained dogs are also costly and require paid, well-trained human handlers. According to the report, dogs may cost $10,000 and scent training per dog is $16,000. All these issues will determine how dogs are used in the future. Their ability is a given. “I think they absolutely can do it,” Otto said.

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