They could well have a role to play in screening for Covid-19 in France: five dogs (Lucky, Eliot, Esquisse, Malko and Marvel), members of the canine brigades of the national gendarmerie in New Aquitaine or firefighters in Gironde, are trained to detect the disease at the training center set up on the Ceva Santé Animale site in Libourne.
The operation began seven weeks ago and is scheduled to continue until June. These dogs, used to looking for missing people or identifying narcotics, have recorded a new specific odor in their olfactory library: that of a person contaminated by Covid-19. They detect it through olfactory cones in which perspiration compresses, taken from patients, have been incorporated.
Blind tests
After several weeks of training the dogs are starting to see results and their flair is promising: “They are also able to detect asymptomatic people”, explains Dr Pierre-Marie Borne, training referent in Libourne. But impossible to track down the virus without their master, “it’s a pair”, he insists: “The dog marks the positive in his own way by sitting up, shaking his head … then his handler confirms that the dog has scored. He rewards him when he finds the scent of a positive patient.”
To ensure that the owner’s behavior does not disturb his dog, the tests are now carried out blind. During training, the master does not know whether the cone contains a compress from a person positive for Covid. Pierre-Marie Borne, on the other hand, knows their composition and notes the performances.
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A complementary solution to the tests?
If the program moves forward, there is still a lot of work to be done to prove the effectiveness of dogs. The study will continue for several months. But if successful, this tool could provide a real complementary solution to screening tests according to Pierre-Marie Borne: “The idea behind it is to use the dogs not as a replacement for a benchmark test, but as a pre-selection to be able to better control. It could be when getting off a boat or a plane , the dogs will mark the positive, which will allow the preselection and then the test will check this positive. The preselection can also make it possible, as a first step, to isolate positive people before they have the results of their reference test to prevent them from contaminating. It is up to the competent authorities to decide, for us the objective is to provide all the elements “.
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