MYAKKA CITY (WSNN) – Your sweat just might put you in the dog house, and in this pandemic, you might be grateful for it! A Manatee County non-profit is training dogs to sniff out COVID-19.
“A beagle can smell in five-seconds what it takes a lab or a shepherd to smell in a minute,” BioScent K-9 Inc. President and Founder, Heather Junqueira said.
Just outside of Myakka City is a farm filled with beagles mixed with basset hounds ready to work.
“They have the 3rd most-largest number of olfactory nerves of all the dogs,” Junqueira said.
BioScent K-9 Incorporated has trained beagles to detect cancer research and other diseases in the past. But now, the beagles are training to detect COVID-19 in human sweat.
“Dogs aren’t actually detecting the virus itself, they’re detecting the body’s response to the virus,” Junqueira said.
COVID training began in March last year. Junqueira says the samples come from gauze pads placed under the armpits of people with COVID.
“Basically it’s a game of hide-and-seek. We will take samples and we will hide them in different canisters and we use control samples as well, so we’ll have samples from people who are perfectly healthy, people who are sick with things that might not be COVID, and then samples of people with COVID.”
The dogs are trained to alert and sit near the COVID sweat samples. She says it’s similar to the dog trained to smell drugs or bombs. The key is a large sample.
“When you’re training on a biological odor, we don’t know exactly what it is, and that’s why we have to use such a large number of samples,” Junqueira said. “The dogs have to learn to discriminate; they learn to pick out that common denominator.”
Junqueira’s partner, Tommy Dickey, is the co-author of the research paper on ‘Use of Medical Scent Detection Dogs for COVID-19 Screening.’
“Our findings in the paper that will be published shortly will indicate that they’re 95-percent effective,” Dickey said. “Which is roughly equivalent to what our PCR and antigen tests that everybody is using.”
Beagles, among other dogs, have a keen sense of smell.
“So, like a drop of perfume in a really really large room, or maybe even in a stadium, a dog could pick up,” Dickey said.
The goal is to use these dogs in large stadiums, airports, and schools; meant for rapid testing.
There are 64 dogs in training, and 10 dogs are already fully trained. The company is preparing to launch its services for COVID sometime next week.
