HCT AND FEDERAL CUSTOMS AUTHORITY DEMONSTRATE DOGS’ ABILITY TO DETECT COVID-19 A research team led by the Higher Colleges of Technology (HCT) and the Federal Customs Authority (FCA) has demonstrated that dogs trained to detect COVID-19 are more accurate than commonly used screening tests. This research received the UAE Innovations Award 2021 from the Mohammed Bin Rashid Centre for Government Innovation. The project began with retraining the FCA’s K9 unit, which had previously been employed to detect explosives. The dogs were taught to recognize and detect the smell of coronavirus in sweat samples collected from the armpits of people who visited a COVID-19 screening center. They were given two seconds per person to screen 3,134 sweat samples. The K9 unit successfully identified 98.2% of the negative samples, missing only 1.8% of the samples that were free from COVID-19. The researchers compared the dogs’
COVID-19 detection accuracy with reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) tests for COVID-19 screening and found that the K9 unit had higher negative predictive value than the RT-PCR test. The K9 unit’s results demonstrated a slightly higher accuracy than that of the PCRs, with a similar specificity. A paper on the project was recently published in the high-impact journal Communications Biology. “We concluded that the diagnostic performance of the detection dogs (K9) test lends itself as a quick routine screening test of COVID-19. It poses as a preferable candidate for its merits such as very low cost, less required facilities and resources, in addition to low risk of COVID-19 transmission, in comparison to PCR tests during sample collection,” the researchers stated in their paper.
THE K9 UNIT SUCCESSFULLY IDENTIFIED 98.2% OF THE NEGATIVE SAMPLES, MISSING ONLY 1.8% OF THE SAMPLES THAT WERE FREE FROM COVID-19
Source: https://hct.ac.ae/en/news/uaes-federal-customs-authority-hct-use-canines-in-world-first-coronavirus-detection-study/
