The supervisor of a dog training program to detect Covid-19 disease told Reuters that Dubai Police has set up a special unit of 38 trained dogs that can detect the disease from human sweat samples with an accuracy of 92 percent.
Dubai Police trained the regiment, which includes German Shepherd, Labrador, Cocker and Border Collie dogs, to detect Covid-19 by olfaction using sweat samples from patients who were confirmed to be infected, after collecting them using an armpit swab for a few minutes.
First Lieutenant Nasser Al Falasi of Dubai Police, who is supervising the program at the K-9 Training Center in Al Awir area in Dubai, said, “We put this sample under the patient’s armpit for a period of one to five minutes as a maximum…This sample is very small and carries the patient’s sweat and odor, then we show it to the dog.” We train the dog on it, and if he gives us a sign on this material, we give him a reward.”
In the center’s large training hall, policemen and dogs walk past a row of metal boxes, only one of which contains a positive sample. Dogs sniff out the samples and within seconds crouch in front of one of them, signaling that they have detected something.
Police trainer Fatima Al Jasmi, who works in the COVID-19 detection team, guides a black and white Border Collie dog during the exercises in which he passed all the tests.
“Within the COVID-19 detection dog team, the training was a kind of challenge, which is to learn a new skill globally and train my dog in it,” she said.
Airports in the UAE were among the first in the world to try to detect the Covid-19 virus through dogs in 2020. The use of dogs has stopped at UAE airports, but they are ready to deploy them when necessary.
The study on the ability of dogs to detect Covid-19 disease, which was conducted by the Higher Colleges of Technology in the Emirates and the Federal Customs Authority in Abu Dhabi and published in June by Communications Biology, a publication of the British scientific journal Nature, concluded that trained dogs achieved a success of 98.2 percent. in detecting injuries.
The study relied on taking sweat samples and conducting polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests from 3,290 people and comparing the results to determine the dogs’ abilities to detect the disease.
A few other countries, including Finland, the United States and France, are training dogs and conducting experiments to explore their ability to identify infected people.
The detection rate of 92 percent referred to by Al Falasi came from a study conducted by the UAE Ministry of Interior in the first half of 2020, the official Emirates News Agency (WAM) reported.
