This archive report was first published on 15 June 2021.
Covid-Sniffing Dogs: Accurate, But Widespread Use Faces Challenges ¶
Published on June 15, 2021, numerous laboratory studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of dog noses in detecting Covid-19. In fact, Covid-sniffing dogs have already started working in airports in other countries and at a few events in the United States, such as a Miami Heat basketball game.
However, some experts in public health and in training scent dogs caution that more information and planning are needed to ensure their accuracy in real-life situations.
According to Cynthia M. Otto, director of the Penn Vet Working Dog Center at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, there are no national standards for scent dogs. This lack of standardization is a significant concern, as it can lead to inconsistent results and make it difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of these dogs.
Lois Privor-Dumm, a public health researcher at Johns Hopkins University, agrees that dogs have great potential in medical fields. However, she emphasizes the need to explore how they could be deployed on a large scale, such as by the government. This would require addressing various ethical, regulatory, and practical considerations, including the quality of detection, logistics, and cost.
Quality control is a first step in ensuring the accuracy of Covid-sniffing dogs. Medical scent detection is more complicated than drug or bomb detection, as it requires dogs to be trained on many different people with varying ethnicities, ages, diets, and other factors that affect human scent.
The symptoms of many medical conditions are similar to those of Covid, and dogs that detect scents associated with fever or pneumonia would be ineffective. Therefore, the human subjects used in training dogs must include 'lots of people that are negative, but might have a cough or might have a fever or other things.'
Any positive cases of Covid infection that the dogs detect are usually confirmed with a PCR test. However, a recent review of research concluded that dogs performed better than the test in detecting Covid.
Despite the promise of Covid-sniffing dogs, there are several hurdles to widespread use. These include the need for standards on how dogs should be trained and how their performance should be evaluated. Dr. Otto is currently working on a committee at the National Institute of Standards and Technology to develop standards for scent detection dogs in various situations, including detection of Covid.
Another challenge is finding enough trained dogs to conduct widespread scent detection. Trained dogs are not easy to come by, and the shortage of dogs in the country for bomb detection is a significant concern. Dogs can be retrained from one scent to another, but this process can be tricky, and it's essential to consider the potential consequences of a dog that sniffs both Covid and bombs and alerts.
Well-trained dogs are also costly and require paid, well-trained human handlers. The training cost for dogs and handlers can range from $33,000 to $46,000, depending on the type of detection. All these issues will determine how dogs are used in the future, and experts agree that their ability to detect Covid is a given, but it's how we implement them that matters.
