Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia – Now, the detection of the Covid-19 virus is not only through the antigen swab test and PCR. The detection of viruses from these bats can be done by dogs. This happened in Thailand.
Trained Thai sniffer dogs have detected Covid-19 through human sweat. It is nearly 95% accurate in training and can be used to identify Covid-19 infection in busy transportation hubs in seconds.
In this training, six Labrador Retrievers who have been trained for six months to test the sweat of infected patients on spinning wheels.
“The dogs only need one to two seconds to detect the virus [Covid-19], “said Professor Kaywalee Chatdarong, project leader of Chulalongkorn University Thailand, as quoted by Reuters, Thursday (18/3/2021).” In one minute, they will make it through 60 samples. “
The dogs can detect volatile organic compounds secreted in the sweat of people with COVID-19, even when there are no symptoms of the disease, the Thai researcher said.
Dogs don’t need to sniff people right away, but they can filter sweat samples, a task that shouldn’t be difficult in a tropical country like Thailand.
Chile, Finland and India are other countries that have also launched efforts to detect the Covid-19 virus using sniffer dogs. Last month a German veterinary clinic revealed its sniffer dogs had achieved 94% accuracy for the detection of Covid-19 in human saliva.
“The next step is we will put them on the field,” said Kaywalee.
“In the future, when we send them to an airport or port, where there are a lot of passengers, they will be faster and more precise at detecting the virus than checking the temperature.”
Thailand has been relatively successful in curbing the rate of Covid-19 virus infection, in the first two months of this year the wave of new infections tended to decline after recording 88 deaths.
(roy/dru)
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