Dec. 10 (UPI) -- "Working" dogs trained to perform search and rescue tasks, detect explosives or diseases such as colon cancer correctly identified people infected with COVID-19 up to 100% of the time, French researchers said Thursday.
The findings suggest that dogs can confirm the presence of the virus by sniffing samples of human sweat, the researchers said in an article published by the journal PLOS ONE.
Although the results still need to be confirmed in larger studies, this proof-of-concept study indicates that trained dogs could provide a "non-invasive" alternative to currently available tests, researchers said.
The dogs also could be used to detect people infected with COVID-19 in public places and hopefully prevent them from spreading the disease to others, the researchers said.
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"In such a crisis the first key word is detection -- and we must test as many people as possible so that positive people stay home and do not spread the virus," study co-author Dominique Grandjean told UPI.
"But it is difficult to undergo a PCR [test] every two days, so yes, dogs can be a help in this situation," said Grandjean, a professor of pathology at the National School of Veterinary Medicine in Paris.
For years, researchers have explored the possibility that trained dogs can be used to detect of a variety of diseases, including cancers and bacteriological infections, according to Grandjean and his colleagues.
They also have shown potential as "alert" animals for those with diabetes and epilepsy, notifying sufferers when blood sugar is low or a seizure is coming, for example.
For this study, Grandjean and his colleagues collected armpit sweat samples from 177 people, 95 of whom had a confirmed COVID-19 infection.
Six dogs were exposed to the sweat samples -- three trained in bomb-sniffing, one in search-and-rescue and two in colon cancer detection -- at sites in Paris and Beirut, the researchers said.
The dogs correctly identified sweat samples from those infected with COVID-19 between 76% and 100% of the time, with three dogs -- one bomb-sniffer and the two colon-cancer detecting dogs -- achieving a perfect success rate, according to the researchers.
"The dogs show that COVID-19 can be detected in a safe manner, [in] a test that is non-invasive, very rapid and more than cheap," Grandjean said.
"Dogs would be a marvelous pretesting system," he said.
