Author: Mario Viciosa González 3º de Farmacia
Scientist confirm that the sharp smell capacity of canes can become a fast and low-cost way to diagnose this tropical disease.
Lexi and Sally, two Labrador dogs and Freya, a Springer Spaniel have proven themselves able to determine malaria just smelling infected people even before the first symptoms begin to appear.
This time is just not click-bait or just an isolated case.
The usage of dogs in the detection of malaria is part of an investigation carried out by the “Tropical Medicine School” in London and financed by the “Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation”. The data and results are still preliminary, but they show how the ultra-sensible sense of smell of these animals is capable of detecting correctly the 70% of the cases. This opens up a new door for detecting tropical infections in the very early stages at a very low economic cost.
This experiment would be the first fast and non-invasive test to detect malaria. And scientist state that this is only the first step – that dogs may be able to detect other diseases like leishmaniosis and trypanosomiasis
"People with malaria parasites generate distinct odors on their skin and our study found dogs, which have an incredibly sensitive sense of smell, can be trained to detect these odors even when it's just on an article of clothing worn by an infected person," said Steven Lindsay, a public health entomologist at in the Department of Biosciences at Durham University in the United Kingdom and the lead investigator on the study.
The experiment began in Gambia where several hundred school children, who had been recruited to join the trial, were checked for overall general health, sampled for malaria parasites and fitted with a pair of socks that they were asked to wear overnight. The next day, the socks were collected. Then, the socks were sorted according to the malaria infection stage of the children who had worn them. Only socks from children with malaria who did not have fever were selected, as were the socks from the children who were uninfected. The socks were then shipped to the United Kingdom where they were stored in a freezer for several months while the dogs were trained.
For the test, trained dogs had to distinguish between socks from children with malaria parasites and socks from uninfected children. They were trained to sniff each sample and to keep still if they thought they detected malaria, or move on if they did not. Using just the sock samples alone, the dogs correctly identified 70 percent of the infected children and 90 percent of the uninfected children.
Further testing revealed some of the children were carrying these more mature parasites. But the dogs were not trained to detect their odor. Moreover, the researchers pointed out that the success rate potentially could have been higher if the dogs were actually with the children or were working with socks that had been worn recently, instead of samples that had been frozen for several months while the dogs were being trained.
However, Lindsay and his colleagues (scientists of that team) said their work was only designed to show that malaria diagnosis by dogs is possible.
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