Researchers say dogs with super-sniffers could detect malaria in humans



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LONDON – Just like working dogs that detect blood sugar in people with diabetes or who sniff fruit, vegetables, drugs or explosive devices, researchers believe that dogs can use their noses to determine if a person has malaria.

According to research from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine released Monday by the American Society of American Society of American Health, research has shown that dogs can be trained to detect if a person is carrying malaria after sniffing the sock of an infected person. Annual Meeting on Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.

The researchers gave hundreds of West African children, infected and uninfected with anti-malaria socks, so that dogs could sniff and identify animals carrying the disease.


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The test included 175 socks, 30 of which were infected with malaria.

Lexi, a mixture of Labrador and Golden Retriever, and Sally, a Labrador, correctly identified socks infected with malaria in 70% of cases. The dogs were able to determine 90% of the time the samples without malaria.

"We put these socks on African children for 12 hours, remove them and freeze them for 15 months before starting training, and then the dogs can pick up this odor," the Washington Post professor and senior researcher told The Washington Post. Durham University, Steve Lindsay.

According to a report from the World Health Organization, six countries are certified free of malaria and 12 others have not reported any cases of malaria occurring in their country since 2000.

However, according to a report from the World Health Organization, more than 216 million cases of malaria were reported in 91 countries in 2016, including 445,000 deaths.

The researchers believe the findings could lead to the use of dogs in ports and airports to help detect the spread of malaria in countries that have eradicated the disease.

"It's useful in countries like South Africa, close to elimination, or in Sri Lanka, which have eliminated malaria," Lindsay told CNN. "How do you locate this person on a million people carrying the parasite in an infection country without doing invasive tests?"

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