Can Dogs Help To Detect Malaria?

We know that dogs have an excellent sense of smell, but you can not get enough of your senses to smell cancer. Some dogs are able to alert their blood sugar is low. Furthermore, a new study suggests that dogs could also be effective at helping to detect malaria.

According to Durham University public health entomologist Steven Lindsay, "Many countries are getting rid of [of malaria]. For example: Sri Lanka has become malaria-free, which is an extraordinary achievement. "The question then is 'how do you keep the place malaria-free, because the mosquitos are not going away'."

He says that the problem rests in the fact even though some people develop sickness when infected with malaria, other people can carry this parasite without showing any symptoms at all. He goes on to say, "If you have one in 1,000 people with a parasitic malaria, you can not do it. [strategy]. "

To answer this, we are looking at Claire Guest, who runs a decade-old charity Medical Detection, which devotes time, money, and energy to supporting research for canine biotection work. She notes "Dogs have something called neophilia, which means they are attracted to new and interesting odors."

In this experiment, the scientists gathered in the Gambia who were screened for malaria. These socks were frozen and then sent to the United Kingdom. Once there, two dogs have been diagnosed with malaria in an area of ​​70 percent. However, the dogs also manage to properly recognize socks worn by a child as much as 90 percent.

Lindsay, then, responds, "Individuals are infected with malaria parasites produce their own breath and their skin that are specific signals."

Finally, he hypothesizes, "It might be that the odors produced by the parasites change if you are the sexual stage or asexual stage," adding that a false positive could be simply related to an infected child having a diagnosis. with malaria.

The next step, of course, is to now determine how well these animals perform.

All of this has been made possible by a $ 100,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.