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Researchers at the University of Durham, UK, discovered that dogs can smell malaria in sock samples worn by infected children.
This discovery was presented at the meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine New Orleans (USA) could help achieve the first rapid and non-invasive screening for this deadly disease.
"Although our investigations are at an early stage, we have shown that dogs can be trained to detect infected people, with malaria for its odor, with a high level of accuracy," said the author. lead author Steve Lindsay.
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The team led by Lindsay hopes that dogs trained to monitor help stop the spread of the disease between countries and allow infected persons to be screened earlier and treated quickly. [196] 59003] "This could be a non-invasive way of detecting disease at entry points in the same way that dogs are used to detect fruit or drugs at airports," said the scientist. .
] The research, funded by the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation, involved the study of nylon socks of healthy children, ages 5 to 14 years and apparently healthy, in a region of The Gambia.
Samples of socks were transported to the United Kingdom. , where a labrador-golden retriever named Lexi, a farmer named Sally and Freya, of English springer spaniel, have been trained to distinguish between the odor of children infected with malaria and those in good health.
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A total of 175 sock samples were badyzed, including those from 30 children with malaria and 145 children not affected by this disease.
the dogs correctly identified 70% of the malaria-infected samples and 90% of the samples without parasites of this disease.
According to the latest World Malaria report from the World Health Organization (WHO), it is estimated that there were 216 million cases of malaria in 2016, an increase of five million compared to the previous year, and 445,000 deaths.
Source: EFE.
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