As we start to better understand the coronavirus, health experts are worried it could rival
the most devastating health crises in recent decades.
Patients with coronavirus may have mild or no symptoms and still be spreading it.
They have no fevers, no cough.
You could be unknowingly, unwittingly, unintentionally spreading this.
To add to this it’s believed the coronavirus is more contagious than seasonal flu.
Any method of disrupting the cycle of infection is worthy of our attention.
Scientists in London who’ve had success in detecting malaria have an unlikely method
they think could be used in preventing the spread of COVID-19.
When you have an infection your body odor, the smells coming from your body, change.
Which is detectable by mosquitoes.
So mosquitoes find you more attractive when you have a malaria infection.
We wondered whether dogs could do the same.
The amazing thing about dogs is they've got an incredible sense of smell,
they've got a very sensitive nose.
But they are also able to learn and they can learn smells.
So by combining the two we were able to train dogs
to be able to detect the smell of malaria
very effectively above the World Health Organization
standards for malaria diagnostic.
So there is a very, very good chance that COVID-19 also has a distinctive odor.
And if it does, then I am really confident that the dogs
would be able to learn that smell and detect it.
And how do you think it could revolutionize our response to COVID-19,
having that kind of test available?
One of the main benefits of it would be that we can rapidly find
people who have an infection but don't have any symptoms.
So normally we screen people for malaria when they present
with the symptoms of malaria and find out if they have it.
What dogs would be able to do with odors is find people
who are showing no symptoms.
So those are the people who will carry on a cycle of infection.
This is in it’s very early stages, do you have a time frame?
So we're hoping that within two to three months
we would have dogs actually deployed and being
out there working to detect.
It's going to be really important that we can monitor people
coming in and out of the country, of any country really,
that is potentially infected. So a screening process to allow
us to do that I think would be very useful,
This is really a form of screening a large number of people.