The Science Behind the sniff

In November 2016, a team of scientists from the Medical Research Council in Gambia visited primary schools armed with hundreds of beige-coloured nylon socks. Handing them out to children there aged five to 14, the researchers instructed them to wear the socks overnight, only taking them off if they were washing their feet for prayer. The next day they returned to collect the dirty laundry, sort it, and put it in the mail to a British charity that would spend the next four months using the material to train dogs to recognise an odour imperceptible to the human nose: the molecular signature of malaria.

Dogs possess a sense of smell many times more sensitive than even the most advanced man-made instrument. Just how powerful is a dogs nose? Powerful enough to detect substances at concentrations of one part per trillion—a single drop of liquid in 20 Olympic-size swimming pools. With training, dogs can sniff out bombs and drugs, pursue suspects, and find dead bodies. And more and more, they’re being used experimentally to detect human disease—cancer, diabetes, tuberculosis, and now, malaria—from smell alone.

Researchers presented these latest results at the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene annual meeting in New Orleans. In double-blind lab tests, two canines proved able to correctly pick out the scent of children infected with malaria parasites 70 percent of the time. While all the schoolchildren appeared healthy, blood tests administered on-site discovered that 30 children were actually carrying the disease. This work is just a proof of concept, but the hope is that one-day bio-detection dogs could be deployed at airports, ports of entry, or other border crossings, to prevent asymptomatic carriers of the parasite that causes malaria from bringing it back into areas where the disease has been eradicated.

Never underestimate the power of your dogs nose!

Reference and Full details

https://www.wired.com/story/the-science-of-the-sniff-why-dogs-are-great-disease-detectors/?fbclid=IwAR0L9gEXHPO7hJYixAuo3q7BeaQTUKzeRv0h7HUVubPa_2b2h_Mu_HxLlAw