COVID: dogs again better than cats, this time as virus sniffers
Another article showed the clear superiority of dogs over cats, this time for detection of SARS-CoV-2 virus (see covid dog sniffers BMCinfdis2020 in dropbox, or https://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12879-020-05281-3 ). as per usual for these types of studies, Jon Pincus brought this to my attention. Details: --8 detection dogs were trained for 1 week to detect saliva or tracheobronchial secretions from Covid-19 patients in a double-blind randomized controled trial (though I’m not sure how they got the dogs to wear blind-folds…) --saliva and tracheobronchial secretion samples were taken from seven hospitalized Covid-19 patients who had positive PCR tests for SARS-COV-2, and seven healthy adults -- 2 of the positive samples were from tracheobronchial secretions and the rest from saliva Results: --of the 1012 samples, overall average detection rate was 94% (+/- 3%): --positive resul...