Casper and Jaya are the first two dogs to be trained by army personnel to sniff out COVID-19. Casper is a two-year-old male dog of Cocker spaniel breed and Jaya is a year old female dog of breed Chippaparai and the third dog Mani is still undergoing training. They started their training in November last year, after the meeting conducted by the workshop International K9 Team, which was held on November 3.
After that, the dogs had been deployed to Chandigarh and Delhi to screen samples and detect COVID-19 among soldiers who are positioned in the areas of the Northern Command. The dogs detected 18 samples as positive out of 806 samples that were examined. The dogs are being trained to identify and search out the Coronavirus by determining unique metabolic biomarkers in urine and sweat samples of individuals.
According to the statement of Lieutenant General Satinder Kumar Saini, it has been inferred that COVID-19 volatile metabolic biomarkers are within the threshold limit detection capability of trained dogs and are capable of quick and real-time detection of disease. A dog can screen approximately 100 samples in an hour. Scientists say that the pandemic can be controlled with such a flashing speed of screening. Saini also stated that the samples don’t carry the virus and are safe. He elucidated, “Whenever any tissue gets infected by a pathogen, it releases a volatile metabolic biomarker, which are signatures, characteristics or fingerprints of the disease. Here, the olfactory equity is also more.”
The Indian army said that the suspicious and uncertain samples were taken from Military Hospital in Meerut Cantonment and the Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose Subharti Medical College of Meerut. Both the types of samples, positive and negative, were taken under consideration. In the initial trial, there were 279 samples of urine and 267 samples of sweat that were used, where Chippaparai was trained to detect urine samples and Cocker spaniel was trained to detect sweat samples.
On Monday, it was found that the dogs were sitting silently near the samples that were detected positive. Saini added that the accuracy was 95% for both the dogs to detect Covid-19 and that the samples identified by dogs as positive are confirmed through the RT-PCR test. The dogs’ capabilities of detecting infected tissues with pathogens have been taken as an advantage that releases volatile metabolic biomarkers.
Eight more military dogs are undergoing training and it is believed that they will be outfitted by March and on finishing the training, all dogs will be deployed at transient camps to screen armed forces who are moving towards forwarding areas.
Many countries like France, Germany, UAE, Russia, UK, Finland, Australia, and Chile have started training dogs for the detection of Covid-19 specifically to screen passengers on Railway station and Airport.
However, the question arises whether this process can be increased to a level where the dogs or any animal can make their impact rather than going to the Labs for the test which takes 48 hours to give results or even more than that. This depicts that dogs are not only people’s best friends but also Messiah.
