Virus World

Starting Wednesday, Finland launches a coronavirus-sniffing-dog pilot program at Helsinki Airport. The voluntary tests will reportedly deliver results in seconds, will require no contact with the dogs and take less than a minute of travelers' time. The voluntary canine tests will deliver results within 10 seconds, and require less than a minute of travelers’ time, said Anna Hielm-Björkman, a researcher at the University of Helsinki who is using the trial to gather data. Researchers in other countries, including the United States and the United Arab Emirates, are studying canine coronavirus tests. But the Finnish trial is among the largest in scale and furthest along. In Dubai, health officials this summer began using dogs to analyze sweat samples from randomly selected air travelers, with more than 90% accuracy, according to initial results.

 

Changes in health can affect the way people smell, researchers say. Dogs long have been valued for their ability to sniff for drugs and bombs, and have proved able to detect cancers, infections and other health problems. Researchers at the University of Helsinki this year found indications that dogs can detect the virus. Scientists say only large-scale trials, such as the one to begin Wednesday, can demonstrate how effective the method will be in practice. As in Dubai, the dogs to be deployed in Helsinki will sniff sweat samples and will not come into contact with travelers. People who agree to the test will swab their necks to produce a sample, to submit through an opening in a wall, said Hielm-Björkman. Regardless of whether they test positive, they will be urged to take a standard polymerase chain reaction (PCR) COVID-19 test so researchers can monitor the dogs’ accuracy. All tests are free for travelers arriving at the airport. Hielm-Björkman said the dogs, according to preliminary research, may be better at detecting coronavirus infections, which can cause the illness COVID-19, than PCR and antibody tests. They “can also find [people] that are not yet PCR positive, but will become PCR positive within a week,” she said. Virpi Perälä, a representative for Evidensia Elainlaakaripalvelut, a network of veterinary clinics that funded the first stage of the trial, during which the initial cohort of dogs were trained, said more funding would be needed to grow the project, depending on initial results.

 

Out of the 16 dogs trained, four are ready to work. Six others are still in training, with another six found to be unsuitable for a noisy airport environment. Experts have warned that canine tests, however effective, can be difficult to scale. Training is time-consuming and expensive. Even so, researchers are optimistic that it will come to play a roll, even if it cannot alleviate the demands on the world’s strained testing systems. One of the aims of the upcoming trial, said Hielm-Björkman, is to gather observations on how long the dogs can work in shifts. “You see very easily on a dog when it starts to get tired,” she said.