Covid-19 coronavirus: Dogs could be used at airports to detect infection

Sniffer dogs could be trained to screen airport passengers arriving in Britain, experts have said.

A British charity that has already trained dogs to detect diseases like cancer, Parkinson's and bacterial infections, believes they can do the same with Covid-19.

Medical Detection Dogs said the canines would be trained by sniffing deactivated samples of Covid-19 and indicating when they have found it against a backdrop of other diseases.

The trained dogs would then be able to sniff people arriving in the UK and indicate if they have the virus in 0.5 of a second, with 90 per cent accuracy, allowing them to be tested and isolated.

Dr Claire Guest, CEO and Co-Founder of Medical Detection Dogs said the dogs could be "hugely valuable" in identifying individuals who are asymptomatic or presymptomatic as well as being able to equate a percentage to the number of infected people entering the UK from "hotspot areas".

She said: "At the moment we have no way, other than testing absolutely everybody, of knowing who these individuals are. The dogs can identify these individuals and they can take a test and be asked to isolate.

The six dogs, named Norman, Digby, Storm, Star, Jasper and Asher could be trained to detect the virus in as little as six to eight weeks and fully deployed at airports, borders and train stations within four months.

Listen to Claire Guest and @ProfKarolSikora on the @SkyNews #Dailypodcast with @DermotMurnaghan talking about how dogs could stop further spread of #COVID19. It starts at 25 mins @mhttps://news.sky.com/story/uk-peak-could-covid-19-detecting-dogs-get-us-out-of-lockdown-11977291

— Medical Detection Dogs (@MedDetectDogs) April 22, 2020

Professor James Logan, Head of Department of Disease Control at The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, and Director of ARCTEC, said: "Dogs can detect odours from humans with a malaria infection with extremely high accuracy – above the World Health Organisation standards for a diagnostic.

"We know that other respiratory diseases like Covid-19, change our body odour so there is a very high chance that dogs will be able to detect it."

Professor Steve Lindsay at Durham University said that he believes the use of dogs could help "prevent the re-emergence of the disease" once lockdown is lifted.

Health screening measures at airports in the UK are decided by the Government and Guest added that it is imperative that they get the green light as soon as possible.

"Every day we're wasting now, it means it's less likely that dogs will be deployed when we get out of lockdown.

"The quicker we move on this, the more likely dogs will have the impact that I believe they can."