The dogs smell your socks or you have malaria

Two years ago, the number of people infected with malaria or who died was lower than ever. But the numbers have increased again in the last two years. Scientists continue to look for ways to detect the disease at an early stage to better limit their spread.

Researchers from the University of Durham conducted an experiment in The Gambia, a region of West Africa where malaria still rages. They subjected hundreds of schoolchildren aged 5 to 14 to thorough medical examinations and also searched for traces of malaria parasites in their blood using a simple finger prick test. They then gave them a pair of socks that they had to keep up all night.

The next morning, the researchers picked up the socks and separated those of 142 healthy children. They also did it with the socks of 30 children who had been diagnosed with malaria but had not seen any flu symptoms yet. They shipped the entire swallow to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where the socks were frozen. Then they trained the labrador Sally and the golden retriever Lexi to recognize the smell associated with malaria.

When dogs were allowed to smell the children's socks, they had to stop when they smoked malaria and went away when they did not. He managed 70% of the socks of infected children and 90% of those of children in good health. The researchers were impressed by the dogs' performance, especially because they also managed to identify children who had fewer parasites in their bodies than needed to be able to detect them by means of a rapid diagnostic test .

Nevertheless, researchers convinced that dogs can do even better. Not only because the children carried different types of parasites, but also because the stage of the disease was different, which is associated with a different smell. In addition, they suspect that socks that have just been removed from the feet work better than if they had been frozen for months.

Springer Spaniel Freya also received training. According to the researchers, the three dogs can be used in the long term, just like drug dogs, in airports to search for malaria parasites carriers quickly, reliably and most importantly non-invasively. This would be useful for limiting the spread of the disease to other countries and for treating patients who do not yet know they are infected more quickly. But first they want to train dogs better, especially to detect all variants of the disorder.