Claim: dogs can smell covid infections

Question

A CNN article came out and claimed that dogs may be able to smell infectious diseases, and can help detect covid in K-12 school. Is this true?

Comments

According to UC Santa Barbara Science and Technology, Dogs can technically smell "symptoms" of COVID-19 illnesses. Professor at UCSB Tommy Dickey did some research, after working with therapy dogs he decided to look into the science part of things and began to conduct a study. He claims dogs can do the same work that an at-home covid test does, which consists of 95% accuracy.  Which overall means dogs can sniff out Presymtimcatic, asymptomatic and symptomatic forms of covid-19.

https://news.ucsb.edu/2023/021174/dogs-can-detect-covid-19-infections-faster-and-more-accurately-conventional-technology#:~:text=The%20dog%20standard&text=All%20these%20enhancements%20mean%20that,swimming%20pools%2C”%20Dickey%20said.

Answer 1

After doing some research of my own I have found that there is some truth to dogs being able to smell infectious diseases. This is due to the fact that dogs can inhale way more than humans. This does not mean that every dog can sniff out disease with ease, and it often takes training for dogs to be able to reliably sniff out things like COVID, cancer, and other diseases.

https://www.understandinganimalresearch.org.uk/news/the-science-of-sniffs-disease-smelling-dogs

Answer 2

The claim is that dogs are able to smell Covid-19, and apparently, this claim seems to be somewhat accurate. The study has been ongoing for years; at the beginning of Covid, I remember hearing a similar story. I had also heard that dogs have been able to sniff out cancer, so this is not as hard to believe. An article from UC Santa Barbara seems to back this up, citing that this test has grown from just 4 papers to 29 peer-reviewed studies. UCLA Health cites that dogs can be up to 97% accurate when sniffing out Covid.

https://news.ucsb.edu/2023/021174/dogs-can-detect-covid-19-infections-faster-and-more-accurately-conventional-technology

https://www.uclahealth.org/news/specially-trained-dogs-can-sniff-out-covid-19-infection

Answer 3

The most important distinction to make in this article is the fact that dogs do not necessarily smell the COVID-19 virus itself, but scents presented when people are exhibiting symptoms of the disease, even symptoms that are usually undetectable by humans. This journalistic article taken from the National Library of Medicine supports the claims made by CNN and affirms the fact that there is genuine science backing up the use of dogs in detecting infections of COVID-19.

Overall, this does not appear to be misinformation.

Source cited: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9751420/

Answer 4

I thought this claim was interesting because I have not heard of other educational institutions implementing this method of detecting Covid-19 in students. I first began to research government websites to test if they were representing Dr. Carol Glaser’s work accurately. After looking at the National Library of Medicine website, CNN did a great job touching base on the studies that Dr. Glaser and her team did. They wanted to detect if they can see if dogs smell volatile organic compounds (VOC) in individuals. However, they did not highlight until the very end that “dogs demonstrated 83% sensitivity and 90% specificity when it came to detecting Covid-19 in the study.” They elaborate that the environment of children was too overstimulating for the dogs to do their appropriate job, although they got better at detecting infections over time. This article is accurate in its storytelling, and it is good that the title includes that the study is a new suggestion, since more studies need to be conducted to fully see if dogs can be the new resource for detecting infections. 

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10126941/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33394052/

Answer 5

I would strongly support the reliability of this claim. In a study in the National Library of Medicine, “Four of the six dogs were able to detect positive samples of patients with COVID-19, with sensitivity and specificity values significantly different from random in the field” (National Library of Medicine). The study explains that the performances of the dogs were promising and had potential to immerse dogs into the control of COVID 19. 

Other studies have also replicated these findings, like a different study in the National Library of Medicine, which concluded that dogs who have gone through training and selection hold potential as real-time detectors of VOC's. (National Library of Medicine). An article in De Gruyter Brill examined 29 different studies of COVID 19 scent dog research, and concluded that the effectiveness of dogs capabilities is up to par and sometimes even more accurate than the RT-PCR test and the RAG test. (De Gruyter Brill). 

Answer 6

Response:

This claim is true and supported by credible research. The CNN article refers to a real pilot program in California where trained detection dogs were used to identify COVID-19 cases in schools. The results showed that the dogs were about 89% accurate at detecting positive cases and 95% accurate at ruling out negatives — that’s inszanely impressive for a non-lab method, i almost for sure saw this as a false claim at first glance. It's not just hype.

Independent studies support these findings. Researchers at UC Santa Barbara demonstrated that dogs could identify COVID-19 from sweat or mask samples in seconds, and a 2023 study in Nature Scientific Reports confirmed that trained dogs could detect the virus with high consistency, even in asymptomatic individuals. Dogs are able to do this because of their sensitivity to volatile organic compounds (VOCs) — the small chemical changes caused by infection.

but it’s important to note that these are controlled pilot programs, not school policies. Training and maintaining detection dogs is costly, and their use is limited. The science is real, but the scale is small.

• CNN: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/24/health/covid-dogs-california-schools-study/index.html

• UC Santa Barbara: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/dogs-can-detect-covid-19-infections-faster-and-more-accurately-conventional-technology

• Nature Scientific Reports (2023): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-30897-1