A Canine Virus Detection System

not the vicious spread of COVID nineteen through the population. Instead, days of protests have rocked the country and some cities around the world in response to the death of George Floyd. Floyd's is the latest in a series of killings of black men and women at the hands of police. While the protests have been mostly peaceful, some participants have broken

store windows and set buildings and cars on fire. The police in many cities have also acted with force, driving vehicles into crowds, firing rubber bullets at protesters, and arresting journalists. The virus may not have been the spark for the protests, but it has helped create the conditions that have made them so volatile. Unemployment has reached levels not seen since

the Great Depression. The disease caused by the virus has killed over one hundred thousand and disproportionately affected the black community, and as the country limps towards reopening, fears about getting sick and economic insecurity hang in the air to make things worse. Health experts are worried that the large gatherings could cause a spike of new infections. Silent carriers of the virus could unwittingly infect others as protesters crammed together,

some without masks. Police in many cities have fired tear gas of protesters, which causes widespread coughing. The virus is dispersed by microscopic droplets in the air when people cough, sneeze, sing, or talk. And now our main story. Dogs have long had a positive link with human health. Science has shown that the benefits of dog ownership extend from reducing the risk of schizophrenia to improving cardiovascular health. But in the era of coronavirus, they have other, as yet untapped powers

to help stop the spread of the virus. Bloomberg Senior editor Jason Gale has more. This is Merlin. He's a six year old Labrador who trained to be a guide dog, but he didn't make the cut. He got distracted by his powerful sense of smell, mostly of edible things. Stopping Merlin stealing food is a full time job for my kids. But what if there was a way of channeling that potent sense of smell to get dogs to sniff out

the coronavirus. Turns out there is. Researchers in Helsinki and London are separately training dogs to detect the coronavirus, and when you think about it, it's not such a stretch. For years, dogs have been routinely used in airports to sniff out explosives, drugs and clandestine food. They have also been used to detect cancer and toxic mold. At the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Professor James Logan

has worked with dogs to find malaria. When you have an infection and your body order, the smells coming from your body change, which is detectable by mosquitoes. So mosquitoes find you more attractive when you have a malaria infection, and we wondered whether dogs could do the same. So we did a study to see whether dogs were able to pick up on this smell. And the amazing thing about dogs is they've got an incredible sense of smell. We've got a very very sensitive nose, but they are

also able to learn and they can learn smells. James says, the dogs are highly effective at identifying people with malaria, even those people who aren't displaying any signs of the disease. It's opened up a new line of research investigating the potential to train cardres of corona catching canines. So we know that diseases have orders. We know this. We know that respiratory type diseases like influenza, for example, also have

orders and they're quite things. So um, there is a very very good chance that COVID ninety also has a distinctive order. And if it does, then I am really confident that the dogs would be able to learn that smell and detected. In Finland and doctor Anna hum Yorkman is a senior researcher in the Department of Equine and

Small Animal Medicine at the University of Helsinki. She's worked with dogs for years and when the pandemic started, it's saying natural to test out their smelling pross and we were fortunate or unfortunate to have a lot of people who had corona in in kind of of our near family and friends, so we got a lot of samples that we were able to pilot with, and in this pilot we could see that the dogs actually had no trouble at all uh finding the virus, so they were

I thought it was actually kind of a an easy smell compared to to the different type of cancer as they've been smelling before. To be clear, Anna wasn't using any old MutS for this experiment. The two dogs she put to the test were professional sniffers with proven all factory skills. But there's another trait that Anna looks for

in a detected dog, a good appetite. The thing that you you train them with is treats, and if they're not very interested in food treats or other like play or something like that, it's very hard to get them to learn anything. So they don't actually have to be a certain breed or a certain age or a certain sex.

It's mostly these two things that are important. When the dogs were put to the test, they detect did the coronavirus in two people who had tested negative for COVID, and it says she wondered whether it was too big a challenge for the poachers, but she gave them the benefit of the town. We first thought that, okay, that this is maybe not so so easy for the dogs because they kind of were not on the They didn't have the same opinion about the samples as did the

tests that had been taken. And since we've been working with dogs for for five years, just with biological samples, we know that mostly they're rights and we're wrong. So An and the colleagues asked those two people to get retested, and actually both of them had developed the corona as a disease in the meanwhile. So one of them was four days tested before and one of them was five days tested before, and the dog could smell them then already before before kind of the clinical disease erupted in

the people. Anna is doing more research to verify and validate these initial findings. She says more work is needed to clarify what the dogs are identifying in patient samples and how long the smell stays after the infection has passed, but she's hoping to publish the results in a scientific journal, and like James Logan in London, she's optimistic about what dogs could bring to the COVID screening table given their proven utility across the number of areas. We have about

thirty different kind of professions that dogs do. We have dogs that are are alarming for for cancer, for epilepsy, for chronic pain, for diabetes patients. We've got dogs that are are trained to look for explosives and drugs and money and whatnot. So so it's actually not far fetched dogs can can do this. So just having a dog standing by the customs when when people come into countries, for example, they can scan up to one human beings

an hour. So that's a totally other scale of potential that that we're we're seeing in kind of testing people. And also it's it's instantly with additional funding, and it says it might be possible to train fifty dogs in Finland to scout for people carrying the coronavirus, ready for when cooler weather later in the year risks bringing a new wave of infections. James Logan says it takes about four to six weeks to train a dog to seek

out a new smell. He's hoping to have dogs ready to deploy in two to three months for the cost of a treat. Recruiting man's best friend to help screen for COVID makes a lot of sense, and anyone who suffered the indignity of an eye watering swab way up the nose can tell you being screened by a dog can only be an improvement. That was Jason Gayle in Melbourne,

And that's our show today. For coverage of the outbreak from one and twenty bureaus around the world, visit bloomberg dot com Flash Coronavirus and if you like the show, please leave us a review and a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the best way to help more listeners find our global reporting. The Prognosis Daily edition is produced by tophor Forehaz, Jordan Gospore, Magnus Hendrickson and me Laura Carlson. Today's main story was reported by Jason Gaal,

Francis Schwartzkoff and fergos O Sullivan. Special thanks to Arabella Gayle, Georgie Gayle and their great pup Merlin. Original music by Leo Sidron. Our editors are Francesco Levi and Rick Shawn. Francesco Levi is Bloomberg's head of Podcasts. Thanks for listening.