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Steven Lindsay, a public health entomologist at Durham University in England, has been researching malaria control for decades. His preferred approach, he says, is to "sit on the boundaries," drumming up ideas that others might not.
Dulles International Airport in Washington, DC. If the beagles could use their noses to detect explosives or contraband in suitcases, he wondered, could they be trained to sniff out an intractable disease that kills more than 400,000 people each year?
Lindsay ended up tackling that question in a project that involved the dirty socks of hundreds of African children and a trio of sniffer dogs in England – and the answer strongly pointed to yes. The 90 percent of the time. 90 percent of the time.
"I think it is quite extraordinary," said Lindsay, the lead scientist on the subject of Monday's presentation at the American Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. "We put these socks on African children for 12 hours, take them off, freeze them for 15 months before we start training, and then the dogs can pick up that odor."
Funding for the project came from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which put a call for research on malaria tests that are noninvasive, unlike current tests that rely on blood samples. Lindsay and his colleagues focused on asymptomatic carriers because they play a key role in malaria's persistence, acting as hidden reservoirs. But doing is a challenge because of current methods make mbad testing impractical.
Lindsay and his colleagues gave the world a thumbs up of nearly 600,000 children who were tested for malaria in Gambia, where the disease is endemic, and asked them to wear them overnight. Researchers ended up with 30 socks from asymptomatic malaria and tested negative for the disease. These were then wrapped in foil, frozen and sent to England, where they were stored at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine while a charity called Medical Detection Dogs trained the pooches.
That malaria alters the volatile compounds that make up a person's aura, and that they are more likely than others to be carriers of the disease, including asymptomatic ones.
"If a mosquito can do it," Lindsay said, "why not a dog?"
Dogs, after all, have proved adept at sniffing out cancer, narcotics, human remains and even orca feces. Jennifer Essler, a postdoctoral fellow who works with dogs at the Penn Vet Working Dog Center.
"What we are here with is the blood plasma," Essler said, referring to her own research. "Does that mean they're detecting the body's response to cancer? Is there something from cancer in the blood? We're not really sure. "
Essler's team is working with scientists from the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia to find out what ovarian-cancer-detection dogs smell. That's because the end goal, she said, is not to have dogs screen patients, but to take what's learned from the dogs to create an "electronic nose" that could screen for ovarian cancer.
"For many reasons, you can not move dogs to a lot of places," she said. Too, "they're still beings. There are still days when they come in and have a bad day. "
Butler says: "It's awesome that people are recognizing the capabilities of dogs and they can be used to help people."
When it comes to malaria, Lindsay said he does not envision squadrons of canines patrolling villages in sub-Saharan Africa. Malaria-detecting electronic noses are also possible outcomes of further research, he said. But in the short term, malaria-detection dogs may be working at ports of entry in countries that have eliminated the disease and want to keep it out.
There, dogs could identify them before, Lindsay said. He said, "It's cheap compared to the cost of having malaria come back into your community."
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