Covid-19 Sniffer Dogs: What Does Science Say?

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As Miami’s AmericanAirlines Arena reopens to a limited number of fans on Thursday, the Miami Heat is releasing dogs it bills as “coronavirus detection dogs” to screen guests and employees upon arrival in the room. ‘establishment. The team will be the first in the NBA to use dogs to screen audiences.

It is not yet clear whether dogs can, in fact, detect coronavirus infection in humans. The team tried the dogs on a smaller scale to filter out staff – and “we’ve learned a lot during that time,” Matthew Jafarian, Miami Heat’s executive vice president for business strategy, told CNN.

If the dog is sitting next to you, says the Miami Heat, it is a signal to the handler that he may have detected Covid-19. A member of staff will then help you and your party with reimbursement and provide additional health and safety information – but you and your party won’t be allowed into the arena.

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Jafarian said the Miami Heat viewed detection dogs as just one tool in a much larger arsenal of Covid-19 security measures – which also includes a health screening questionnaire, mandatory mask policy, booths of cashless concession, prohibiting food and drink in the arena bowl, and physical distancing, among other tools.

Canine experts point out that while research on coronavirus detecting dogs looks promising, it is not yet definitive. Studies exploring the reliability of dogs in detecting active coronavirus infection continue – and many questions remain to be answered.

“I think it’s so new and novel that we have yet to determine its effectiveness and reliability in dogs for detecting this type of thing,” said Dr. Douglas Kratt, president of the American Veterinary Medical Association.

“We’re just at the forefront,” he says. “But it’s very exciting to see that we might have another tool to detect the coronavirus.”

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At the start of the pandemic, the Miami Heat first explored the use of detection dogs – along with other approaches – to screen for the novel coronavirus at its facilities.

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“During the NBA bubble, that’s really when we started to research, seriously, how we could get fans back safely into the arena,” Jafarian said, referring to the strict lockdown that players and the NBA staff suffered last year as the “bubble”.

“We’ve looked at a variety of options. We’ve looked at breathalyzer tests. We’ve looked at traditional diagnostic tests, like rapid antigen and PCR tests. And we’ve been operationally thinking about how. we could administer that to hundreds and thousands of people entering the building. “

Jafarian added that around the same time some of the early studies were being published outside of Europe and elsewhere. Studies are unproven and published as pilot papers and proof of concept. Asked that the research was not definitive, Jafarian replied that he was originally skeptical, but found the studies “compelling” because they achieved similar results. He said the Miami Heat followed their dog program “very slowly” until he learned more.

In July, German researchers published a pilot study in the journal BMC Infectious Diseases describing how they trained eight dogs to distinguish between saliva samples from a person with Covid-19 and a healthy person. .

The researchers reported in their study that among 1,012 samples, the dogs correctly identified 157 positive samples and 792 negative samples, but incorrectly identified 33 samples as negative and 30 samples as positive. The dogs “achieved an overall average detection rate of 94%,” the researchers wrote.

In December, a separate research team from France and Lebanon published a proof-of-concept study in the journal PLOS ONE detailing how they trained six dogs to tell the difference between armpit sweating of someone with Covid -19 and a person who does not have one. . Some dogs had a 76% success rate, while others had a 100% success rate in this study.

But these studies were conducted in controlled environments and there was repeated use of samples – so it couldn’t be ruled out if a dog memorized the scent of a sample. More research is needed to determine if similar results could emerge in the real world and among a larger group of detection dogs.

Elsewhere in the UK, a team from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine trained six dogs in hopes they could detect people who are Covid-positive – even if people show no symptoms.

In Finland, a group of dogs trained to detect Covid-19 began work at Helsinki airport in September with the aim of identifying people who have contracted the virus. And in Chile, police dogs are being trained to detect Covid-19 infections.

“We saw what the airport was doing in Finland, then an airport in Dubai, and [governments] in Mexico and Chile, ”said Jafarian of Miami Heat.

Then a few months later, a new company called SNIFF approached the Miami Heat with an offer to use detection dogs as a tool to screen for coronaviruses in the team arena.

Jafarian said: “we have decided to take a step forward”.

‘The virus is new’, the use of detection dogs is not

Aron Shteierman, chief executive of SNIFF, told CNN he had no experience training dogs, but when the coronavirus pandemic began he saw dogs as a possible rapid, non-invasive screening tool. .

In the spring of last year, Shteierman turned his idea into a business: SNIFF. Then he said he contacted the company Global K9 Protection Group and requested a partnership, specifically to use and train the company’s dogs for coronavirus detection. Global protection group K9 agrees.

“The virus is new, but the application of using a detection dog to screen people is not,” Michael Larkin, vice president of business services for the Global K9 Protection Group, told CNN .

SNIFF and Global K9 Protection Group then contacted the Miami Heat.

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Shteierman confirmed that “we don’t use live virus to train dogs,” but he would not share specific details on the dog training process with CNN. He said it was “proprietary” information.

CNN could not verify the company’s research behind detection dogs, as well as the dogs’ effectiveness, as it has yet to be published. For this research, Shteierman said, “We took the canines to a testing site where PCR testing was done and we did comparison results.”

Yet dogs are not a substitute for getting an actual diagnosis from a PCR test or from a medical professional, said Larkin of the Global K9 Protection Group.

“It’s important for people to understand that this technology and this solution is evolving, and it’s not a substitute for going to a doctor or a PCR test,” Larkin told CNN. “The dog is designed to be a primary screening tool for the human body, but if there was a positive indication, our first recommendation would be to go see a doctor and have a PCR test.”

“ Some level of proof, but I don’t think it’s foolproof ”

There are still important questions.

For example, some studies suggest that a dog handler’s own biases can influence a detection dog’s behavior. A 2011 study published in the journal Animal Cognition found that among 18 dog handler teams, a dog was more likely to mistakenly “alert” that it had detected a scent – so give a false positive – when the master believed it was a gift of perfume.

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And with regard to the coronavirus in particular, it’s unclear exactly what dogs might pick up when trained to detect Covid-19.

In the two previous studies in Germany, France and Lebanon – published in the journals BMC Infectious Diseases and Plos One – the two research teams hypothesized that their dogs could detect the “volatile organic compounds” produced during infections. coronavirus.

“It’s not like the coronavirus has a smell. It’s when a person gets infected with a virus, their metabolism changes in such a way, their breathing changes in such a way, that there are subtle changes that you can train dogs to detect. So it’s not the virus that they are detecting, it is the physiological changes induced by the virus that they are detecting, ”Dr. Amesh Adalja, senior researcher at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security, told CNN. did not participate in the studies. .

“That’s probably what dogs react to,” he says. “We know for other purposes, we use dogs that way for sniffing bombs, for drugs, and they’ve tried using them for diagnosing cancer. They’ve also tried using them for diagnosing C. . Diff.” Clostridioides difficile bacteria which causes severe diarrhea and inflammation of the colon.

A 2018 study suggests that a 3-year-old German Shepherd named Piper and a 3-year-old Border Collie named Chase were able to detect the presence of C. difficile in stool samples that had been stored in a refrigerator with sensitivity ranging from 77.6 to 92.6 and a specificity of 84.4 to 85.1.

However, C. diff is a bacterium. There isn’t a lot of research on dogs detecting viral infections. A study, published in the journal Frontiers in Veterinary Science in 2015, found that two trained dogs could discern between cultured cells infected with three different viruses – but these were viruses that infect cattle, not humans.

Adalja said more research on dogs detecting coronaviruses is needed.

“There is starting to be a certain level of evidence, but I don’t think it’s foolproof,” Adalja said. “It’s not yet final.”

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