COVID-Sniffing Dogs Are Accurate but Face Hurdles for Widespread Use

Bobby the K9 retriever dog sniffs sweat samples, in a test to detect the Covid-19 coronavirus through volatile organic compounds, at the Faculty of Veterinary Science in Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok on May 21, 2021.

“There are no national standards” for scent dogs, according to Cynthia M. Otto, director of the Penn Vet Working Dog Center at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine and one of the authors of a new paper on scent dog use in COVID detection.And although private groups certify drug-sniffing and bomb and rescue dogs, similar programs for medical detection do not exist, according to the new paper in the journal Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness.

Quality control is a first step, and a large one. Medical scent detection is more complicated than drug or bomb detection, Otto said. A dog working an airport for drugs or explosive detection has a consistent context and a fairly straightforward target odor. In COVID detection, researchers know that the dogs can distinguish an infected person’s sweat or urine. But they don’t know what chemicals the dog is identifying.

Any positive cases of COVID infection that the dogs detect are usually confirmed with what is now the gold standard for confirming the presence of the coronavirus, a PCR test. A review of research published last week concluded, however, that dogs performed better than the test. She said that even if standards are clearly set, finding enough dogs to conduct widespread scent detection is another hurdle. Trained dogs are not easy to come by. “We have a shortage of dogs in this country for bomb detection. We’ve been dealing with that for years,” she said.

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