UK researchers test dogs' ability to sniff out COVID-19

Dogs' ability to sniff out whether people are infected with COVID-19 before showing any symptoms will be put to the test by British researchers, in a bid to develop a fast, non-invasive means of detecting the disease.

Britain's government said on Saturday (May 16) it had given £500,000 ($606,000) towards the research, which will be conducted by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Durham University and British charity Medical Detection Dogs.

Professor James Logan, lead researcher for the work, said the study seeks to determine whether people with COVID-19 have a distinctive body odour that could be detected by dogs in a similar way to those with malaria.

A decade of research by Medical Detection Dogs has found dogs can be trained to detect certain diseases at the equivalent dilution of a teaspoon of sugar in two Olympic-sized swimming pools.

More than 4.55 million people have been reported to have been infected by the novel coronavirus globally and 306,001 have died, according to a Reuters tally.

Infections have been reported in more than 210 countries and territories since the first cases were identified in China in December 2019.