Kyp is a 4-year-old Labrador with a nose for a problem. He and his canine friends have a solution to get us back to normal after COVID. New research projects have shown dogs can sniff out people with the virus, fast.
Vaccinations mean COVID will soon stop being so dangerous and life will go back to normal, with people travelling and being in crowds. But the virus will still be a problem and we’ll have to keep testing people for it to stop it spreading again. Testing lots of people is slow and expensive.
Dogs have smelly superpowers. They have 50 times more smell sensors in their noses than we do. Scientists have found that dogs can smell COVID in people’s sweat. So, we could start training dogs to sniff out the virus in crowds, letting us quickly treat and isolate people with the bug.
The research paper led by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine is here and the accompanying press release from May 21 is on the website of Dr. Claire Guest’s charity Medical Detection Dogs. You can also find out more about Kyp and the other dogs – and donate to their amazing work – via their home page.
The BBC wrote up the British study here and The Guardian had this on the French research as well as this on the trials at Helsinki and Dubai airports last year.
You can listen to Claire Guest discussing the trials with The Economist’s science podcast Babbage here, for 7 minutes from 16’55” to 23’50”.
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