geoffrey modest medical blogs

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...

Yet another small study was done in China, this one looking at SARS-CoV-2 in different animals (see   covid pets science2020  in dropbox, or doi.10.1126/science.abb7015). The issue here is that there may well be important intermediate animal sources for viral transmission to humans. Details: --they assessed ferrets, cats, dogs, pigs, chickens, and ducks after introducing 10 5  plaque-forming units of SARS-CoV-2 into these animals --for each animal group other than ferrets, they tested both the inoculated animals as well as contact animals in adjacent cages to see if they would be infected by airborne virus Results: --ferrets: both viral RNA and infectious virus were detected in their nasal turbinates, soft palate, and tonsils in the 4 ferrets tested     --viral RNA was detected in nasal washes for up to 8 days post-inoculation, but negative at day 10; rectal swabs had lower viral loads than the nasal swab, and no infectious virus was found in the rectal...