Dogs sniff out corona infection

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With just one week of training, dogs were able to sniff out Sars-CoV-2 - and more reliably than expected.

According to a study, specially trained dogs can sniff out corona infections quite reliably. "The dogs only had to be trained for one week in order to differentiate between samples from Sars-CoV-2 infected patients and non-infected controls," said the Hannover Veterinary University Foundation on Thursday.

"The method could be used in public areas such as airports, at sporting events, at borders or other mass events as a supplement to laboratory tests to prevent further spread of the virus or outbreaks," it said.

The team around Holger Andreas Volk from the University of Veterinary Medicine Hanover, which included employees from the Hanover Medical School and the Hamburg-Eppendorf University Clinic, tested eight specialized detection dogs from the only service dog school of the German Armed Forces in Ulmen in Rhineland-Palatinate.

Good hit rate

After the one-week training, the dogs were able to correctly identify 94 percent of 1012 samples of saliva or respiratory secretions, as the team reports in the journal "BMC Infectious Diseases". The samples were randomly distributed. Neither dog handlers nor researchers knew which of them were corona-infected and which were corona-free.

The dogs recognized 83 percent of the positive samples and 96 percent of the negative control samples. Federal Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer (CDU) wanted to visit the office near Ulmen in the Vulkaneifel this Friday.

"The smell detection of dogs is far better than the general public can imagine," explains behavioral researcher Esther Schalke from the service dog school. "Still, we were amazed at how quickly our dogs could be trained to detect samples from Sars-CoV-2 infected people." (ag / dpa)

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