Covid-sniffing dogs

There may soon be a new tool for detecting coronavirus, one with a finely tuned nose and a wagging tail. Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania have launched a new trial to see if dogs—whose olfactory prowess is already used to detect drugs, explosives, and diseases such as malaria and cancer—can help sniff out the virus at airports, businesses, and hospitals. The subjects, eight Labrador retrievers, will have their noses exposed to saliva and urine taken from Covid-19 patients. They will then be tested to see if they can discriminate between samples with the virus and samples without it. If the dogs can do that, the researchers will then see if they can identify the virus by sniffing infected people—including those who aren’t showing any symptoms. A similar governmentfunded trial is underway in the U.K., using cocker spaniels and Labradors. “Dogs have many more [nasal] receptors, and that allows them to process these odors really incredibly fast,” Cynthia Otto, project leader of the University of Pennsylvania trial, tells RollingStone.com. “Their entire noses are just built for this kind of work.”

as 75 percent, reports CNBC.com. In the first study of its kind, researchers at the University of Hong Kong placed healthy hamsters in one cage, and hamsters that had been infected with the virus in an adjacent one, with a fan blowing air between the two cages. The researchers then created three scenarios to mimic real-life situations: with mask barriers covering the cage containing the infected rodents; with masks on the cage containing the healthy hamsters; and with no masks at all. When no masks were used, 10 out of 15 healthy hamsters—or 67 percent—were infected within a week. With masks on the healthy cage, the infection rate fell to 33 percent— and when they were on the infected cage, it dropped to 17 percent. What’s more, the hamsters that did become infected in the mask scenarios had less of the virus in their bodies than those infected without masks. “We do not have a safe and effective vaccine,” says lead author Yuen Kwok-yung. “What remains practical is still either social-distancing measures or wearing masks.”