Thai investigative dogs trained to detect COVID-19 in human sweat proved to be approximately 95% accurate during training and can be used to identify coronavirus infections within seconds at busy transportation centers, according to a pilot project The chief said.
The six Labrador retrievers participated in a six-month project that included opening an infected patient’s sweat to test them on the spinning wheel of six canned ships.
“Dogs only take one to two seconds to detect the virus,” Professor Kaywale Chatdarong, project leader at the Veterinary Faculty of Chulalongkorn University in Thailand, told Reuters. “Within a minute, they will manage to pass through 60 samples.”
The Thai researcher stated that dogs can detect a volatile organic compound secreted in the sweat of Covid-19 victims, even in the absence of disease symptoms.
He said that dogs would not need to smell people directly, but they could check samples of sweat,
Chile, Finland and India are the other countries that have started efforts to get sniffer dogs to detect the virus, a German veterinary clinic said last month that its sniffer dogs detected 94% in human saliva.