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Dog Savior: Immediate scent-detection of SARS-COV-2 by trained dogs

bioRxiv, ISSN: 2692-8205
2020
  • 10
    Citations
  • 0
    Usage
  • 0
    Captures
  • 4
    Mentions
  • 804
    Social Media
Metric Options:   Counts1 Year3 Year

Metrics Details

  • Citations
    10
    • Citation Indexes
      9
      • CrossRef
        9
    • Policy Citations
      1
      • Policy Citation
        1
  • Mentions
    4
    • News Mentions
      4
      • News
        4
  • Social Media
    804
    • Shares, Likes & Comments
      804
      • Facebook
        804

Most Recent News

COVID-19 Testing: Going to the Dogs?

Mara Aspinall, managing director, BlueStone Venture Partners; professor of the practice, biomedical diagnostics, Arizona State University. For at least the 15,000 years since the first-known

Article Description

Molecular tests for viral diagnostics are essential to confront the COVID-19 pandemic, but their production and distribution cannot satisfy the current high demand. Early identification of infected people and their contacts is the key to being able to isolate them and prevent the dissemination of the pathogen; unfortunately, most countries are unable to do this due to the lack of diagnostic tools. Dogs can identify, with a high rate of precision, unique odors of volatile organic compounds generated during an infection; as a result, dogs can diagnose infectious agents by smelling specimens and, sometimes, the body of an infected individual. We trained six dogs of three different breeds to detect SARS-CoV-2 in respiratory secretions of infected patients and evaluated their performance experimentally, comparing it against the gold standard (rRT-PCR). Here we show that viral detection takes one second per specimen. After scent-interrogating 9,200 samples, our six dogs achieved independently and as a group very high sensitivity, specificity, predictive values, accuracy, and likelihood ratio, with very narrow confidence intervals. The highest metric was the negative predictive value, indicating that with a disease prevalence of 7.6%, 99.9% of the specimens indicated as negative by the dogs did not carry the virus. These findings demonstrate that dogs could be useful to track viral infection in humans, allowing COVID-19 free people to return to work safely.

Bibliographic Details

Omar Vesga; Maria Agudelo; Yuli Agudelo; Andres F. Valencia; Alejandro Mira; Felipe Ossa; Yudy Aguilar; Javier M. González; Juan C. Cataño; Esteban Ocampo; Karl Čiuoderis; Laura Perez; Andres Cardona; Juan P. Hernández-Ortiz; Jorge E. Osorio

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology; Agricultural and Biological Sciences; Immunology and Microbiology; Neuroscience; Pharmacology, Toxicology and Pharmaceutics

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