Good News! The COVID-Sniffing Dogs Are Here...

Guille said:
I wonder if I can train my dog to sniff out my car keys?
Click to expand...

Maybe, if you soak them in liquid ass...

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PoliTalker said:
Miami Heat to use coronavirus-sniffing dogs to screen fans at games

"If you think about it, detection dogs are not new," said Matthew Jafarian, the Heat's executive vice president for business strategy. "You've seen them in airports, they've been used in mission critical situations by the police and the military. We've used them at the arena for years to detect explosives."

"The coronavirus-sniffing dog idea has been put into place at airports in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and Helsinki, Finland, in recent months. "

"At Heat games, fans arriving for the game will be brought to a screening area and the detection dogs will walk past. If the dog keeps going, the fan is cleared; if the dog sits, that's a sign it detects the virus and the fan will be denied entry."

"Dogs have a superior sense of smell, which is why they're often used by law enforcement to find everything from drugs to bombs to missing people. Medical researchers have long reaped the benefit of canine sniffing, training some dogs to detect when a human is dealing with things like too much stress, too little blood sugar and even certain cancers.

"Researchers are finding that specially trained dogs can detect COVID on humans quickly and accurately," Jafarian said.

A study released last July showed dogs in Germany were able to sniff out the coronavirus with incredible accuracy. According to the study, eight dogs from Germany's armed forces sniffed the saliva of more than 1,000 people, both healthy and infected, identifying the coronavirus with a 94% success rate. "

***

I say Bring 'em ON!

Train more!

Use 'em EVERYWHERE...
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So now 4chan has a QAnon equivalent for loons?
 
PoliTalker said:
Miami Heat to use coronavirus-sniffing dogs to screen fans at games

"If you think about it, detection dogs are not new," said Matthew Jafarian, the Heat's executive vice president for business strategy. "You've seen them in airports, they've been used in mission critical situations by the police and the military. We've used them at the arena for years to detect explosives."

"The coronavirus-sniffing dog idea has been put into place at airports in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and Helsinki, Finland, in recent months. "

"At Heat games, fans arriving for the game will be brought to a screening area and the detection dogs will walk past. If the dog keeps going, the fan is cleared; if the dog sits, that's a sign it detects the virus and the fan will be denied entry."

"Dogs have a superior sense of smell, which is why they're often used by law enforcement to find everything from drugs to bombs to missing people. Medical researchers have long reaped the benefit of canine sniffing, training some dogs to detect when a human is dealing with things like too much stress, too little blood sugar and even certain cancers.

"Researchers are finding that specially trained dogs can detect COVID on humans quickly and accurately," Jafarian said.

A study released last July showed dogs in Germany were able to sniff out the coronavirus with incredible accuracy. According to the study, eight dogs from Germany's armed forces sniffed the saliva of more than 1,000 people, both healthy and infected, identifying the coronavirus with a 94% success rate. "

***

I say Bring 'em ON!

Train more!

Use 'em EVERYWHERE...
Click to expand...
Updates?;)
 
Interestingly, this article came out AFTER the Slate article:

Time: 'It's a Game for Them.' Scientists Around the World Are Teaching Dogs to Sniff Out COVID-19

"It’s that olfactory prowess that could make dogs a useful ally in our battle against a virus that’s killed over 1 million people worldwide. Scientists have long known that people sick with certain diseases emit particular odors—different infections affect different parts of the body in different ways, often producing specific combinations of volatile compounds. Dogs have shown a remarkable ability to pick up on those airborne chemicals, detecting when people are infected with malaria, infectious bacteria, and even certain types of cancer. Now scientists are hoping that dogs’ keen sense of smell, 10,000 times better than that of humans, can help them identify people carrying COVID-19, too.

Lindsay, along with collaborators at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and the U.K.-based nonprofit Medical Detection Dogs, is working on a U.K. government-funded study that will test dogs’ ability to detect COVID-19. Their goal: to train coronavirus-sniffing dogs, which could then be deployed at schools, airports and other public venues to reinforce existing nasal swab testing programs. A similar study is underway at the University of Pennsylvania.

“We’re not just doing the proof of concept work, we’re also working out actively how to deploy this and scale it up as well, because we want to hit the ground running once we’ve gotten our results,” says James Logan, the head of LSHTM’s Department of Disease Control and the project lead on the U.K. study.

Other studies have produced promising, albeit early, results. In June, a team in France using a small number of samples collected from human patients who had been tested for COVID-19 in PCR tests (the current gold standard for testing) found a high degree of evidence that dogs could detect COVID-19 infections through differences in the smell of human subjects’ armpit sweat. (Also concluded: dogs don’t particularly mind sniffing people’s armpits.) In Germany, researchers ran a small pilot study, published in July, with trained coronavirus-sniffing dogs—corona-schnüffelnder hunde—and showed that the dogs were able to distinguish between coronavirus-positive samples and a control group with an average sensitivity (the rate of detecting true positives) of 83% and a specificity (true negative rate) of 96% after only one week of training. That’s not quite as accurate as COVID-19 rapid antigen tests, which have a sensitivity ranging from 84% to nearly 98% and specificities of 100%. But antigen tests require often uncomfortable nasal swabs, and take about 15 minutes to return results. Dogs, by contrast, may be able to tell if a person is infected in seconds, no swab needed."
 
Primavera said:
Hardly new news except to her, of course!
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What ShitTalker "forgot" to post from his source:

"To train dogs, researchers must first safely collect samples from people—their saliva, sweat, or urine—and test them for COVID-19. Then, researchers treat samples to render the virus inactive to make sure no dogs are exposed. Not only does this training require some special equipment, but it’s also fairly time-intensive. In one study by German researchers, dogs were intensively trained for a week, smelling more than 1,000 samples.

those were dogs already trained in scent detection, a relatively small and elite population. Dogs with no previous training would need anywhere from three to six months to learn, according to Anne-Lise Chaber and Susan Hazel, animal cognition researchers from the University of Adelaide. Not all dogs who start the training will be up to snuff; just as some work or service dogs turn out to be better pets, some COVID-smelling dogs might turn out to be better suited for a life of leisure.

There’s also evidence that what happens in the lab may not adequately prepare dogs for what they’d need to do in the real world. In many cases, dogs are trained using a consistent ratio of positive to negative samples; for instance, in training the German study, dogs sniffed 1 positive case for every 6 negative samples and were tested at a ratio of about 1 positive to 5 negative samples. But that ratio is highly unlikely in the real world.

That could spell trouble for real-world screenings. Previous research on cancer-sniffing dogs suggests that changing up the consistency of positive to negative cases can throw dogs off, so the same issue could occur with COVID detection. In a cancer detection study, researchers emulated a real-world scenario by moving away from a training and testing regime that depended on those strict, fixed ratios. Instead, they trained dogs for six months without using any specific ratio, and when they finally could correctly identify 1 positive sample to every 5 negative samples, they “graduated” to a testing phase, where they were given five samples, which contained a random number of positives. One dog may have gotten zero positives among the five samples; another could have sniffed five samples that were all positive. Dogs’ accuracy was much lower, which, the authors say, is an indication that methods need to be refined if dogs are expected to screen samples effectively.

Though early studies have shown dogs can achieve a high level of accuracy—in that German study, the average accuracy of a dog was about 94 percent—dogs’ abilities are certainly imperfect.

The standard nasal swab COVID-19 tests are not very accurate, either, and may not detect small viral loads; similarly, dogs’ sensitivity to samples might vary depending on viral load.

In Dubai, the dogs are presented as a “backup” precaution, not a direct determinant of whether people can get on planes; the United Arab Emirates already requires travelers to present evidence of a negative PCR COVID-19 test.

Knowing that dogs could make mistakes, we’d likely want to set up a protocol for what happens after a dog identifies a person or sample that is potentially COVID-positive. Will they need to submit to a rapid COVID-19 test to be allowed entry to a sports arena or the airport, or will they just immediately be turned away?

These logistical and ethical concerns may make the entire enterprise more trouble than it’s worth.

LiveScience points out that the first paper suggesting dogs could help sniff out cancer was published in 1989, but it’s never really caught on because of how time-consuming the training is, and how hard it is to keep the dogs engaged in the field.

https://slate.com/technology/2020/08/covid-19-sniffing-dogs.html
 
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