Experts test: Can dogs sniff out the coronavirus?

London (UK) - It is well known that dogs have particularly sensitive noses. It is also known that different diseases in humans cause different smells that only dogs can detect. Now experts suspect that Covid-19 also emits a very special scent that dogs can recognize.

However, it must first be clarified whether people actually smell differently than usual when they are infected with the coronavirus.

If this is the case, it would be entirely possible to train dogs to react to a "certain" coronavirus smell. Similar to what drug dogs do when found at the airport. At least that's what British doctors believe, reports theNew York Post.

"We know that diseases have odors - including respiratory diseases such as influenza - and that these odors are in fact quite different," explained James Logan, head of the Department of Disease Control at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM).

"There's a very, very good chance that Covid-19 has a specific smell, and if that's the case, I'm really confident that the dogs will learn that smell and be able to recognize it," James Logan believes.

This has already worked with extremely high accuracy in patients with malaria infection. But that's not all. According to the researchers, dogs can also recognize the slightest temperature fluctuations in humans and thus detect a rapidly rising fever, which can indicate an infection.

According to the experts at LSHTM, the training of dogs with sensitive noses has already begun. It should be completed in around six weeks. The hope is that the dogs will then be able to recognize asymptomatic virus carriers. These are people who carry the virus and are infectious, but have hardly any symptoms themselves and are therefore not currently being tested.

If the training of the dogs is successfully completed, the animals could supplement the virus tests currently in use with their work and test around 250 people per hour.