To find Covid-19 better the dog of the PCR test
The best friends of men, and doctors! Dogs – which are used to sniff out everything from drugs to bombs – are also effective at sniffing COVID-19 positivity, according to a new French study published by Bloomberg.
If this is confirmed by other institutions there would be the possibility of making invasive tests and certificates rather useless.
Dogs' ability to detect the virus has reached a sensitivity of 97%, a level that puts this method on par with the most reliable rapid antigen tests. The Sniffing method was also found to be 91% specific, a technical measure of the dogs ability to correctly identify negative samples. This "sensitivity index" is higher than that of many 15-minute antigen tests, which tend to be more effective in ruling out infection than in finding it.
And with Europe reopening its economy to vaccinated tourists on Wednesday, the results of these studies could not have come at a better time. As Bloomberg points out, virus-sniffing dogs could be used extensively in airports, train stations, or wherever crowds gather to screen people, just as they are used to detect drugs or bombs.
Using dogs also means that COVID could be identified in a split second non-invasively and extremely cheaply (in theory, it wouldn't cost that much to train dogs, and the methods would be straightforward to those accustomed to training drug-sniffing dogs and dogs. bombs).
The study was conducted at France's national veterinary school, according to Bloomberg, who shared a few more details about the study.
The trial, conducted at the French national veterinary school of Maisons Alfort near Paris, collected sweat samples from the participants' armpits with cotton pads closed in jars and gave them to at least two different dogs for sniffing. None of the dogs had previous contact with the volunteers. 335 people were tested, including 109 positive in a PCR test that served as a control. Nine dogs participated and the researchers did not know which samples were positive.
In July, German researchers showed that trained dogs were able to distinguish between saliva sampled from people infected with the virus and those that were no more than 90 percent of the time. Finland, Dubai and Switzerland have begun to train dogs to sniff out infections.
The latest study was conducted between March 16 and April 9 and the Ile-de-France region helped fund the trial, contributing 25,000 euros ($ 30,500).
Efforts to train dogs to sniff COVID are underway across Europe and the world. In the UK, a team from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine is training six dogs in the hope that they will be able to detect COVID positive people, even if they have no symptoms. In Finland, sniffer dogs have been working to detect infected travelers at Helsinki airport since September.
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The article To find Covid-19 better the dog of the PCR test comes from ScenariEconomici.it .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/per-scovare-il-covid-19-meglio-il-cane-del-test-pcr/ on Fri, 21 May 2021 17:34:34 +0000.