Are Covid-Sniffing Dogs at Risk?

In this week's edition of the Covid Q&A, we look at Covid-sniffing dogs. In hopes of making this very confusing time just a little less so, each week Bloomberg Prognosis is picking one question sent in by readers and putting it to experts in the field. This week's question comes to us from Gail, who is curious about how dogs are able to sniff out Covid-19. Gail asks:

Are dogs trained to detect Covid-19 at risk of getting infected?

Covid-sniffing pups are one of the more fun news stories of the past year. The gist is this: Dogs have a far more advanced sense of smell than humans—between 10,000 and 100,000 times more sensitive. Their use in law enforcement to track drugs and explosives is well-known, and researchers have long experimented with dogs that can smell diseases like diabetes or cancer. So it’s not surprising that scientists are now studying whether canines can be useful in ferreting out Covid infections So far, research suggests that they can do so with incredible accuracy.

“Studies confirm that people with coronavirus infections give off unique odors,” says Audrey Odom John, division chief of infectious diseases
at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Her group found that specialized machines called mass spectrometers could identify odors that are more abundant in the breath of children with a Covid infection than in uninfected kids. Other groups had the same results with adults.

”We think that these odors come from changes in metabolism in cells infected with coronavirus, or perhaps from changes in the metabolism in immune cells that are responding to the infection,” she says.

Dogs are then trained to hunt for those smells. While our four-legged friends wouldn’t replace traditional testing, there’s growing enthusiasm for the role they could play in crowded places like airports and ballparks.