Late last month, a team of researchers from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), the registered charity Medical Detection Dogs, and Durham University, all in the U.K., announced an intriguing new initiative.

The team wants to explore the potential of using dogs to detect COVID-19 in people who may have developed the disease.

This idea came from the fact that canines are very adept at picking up on subtle signs of illness thanks to their acute sense of smell.

In fact, some researchers have even suggested that dogs can detect the presence of lung cancer in clinical samples, and that they may be better at it than doctors’ “most advanced technology.”

Also, the same research team that kickstarted the current initiative has found that dogs are capable of “sniffing out” infectious diseases, specifically malaria.

“Our previous work demonstrated that dogs can detect odors from humans with a malaria infection with extremely high accuracy — above the World Health Organization [WHO] standards for a diagnostic,” says Prof. James Logan, head of the Department of Disease Control at LSHTM.

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