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Thailand’s first Covid-19 sniffer dog team made its official debut to the public and press Thursday after a team at Chulalongkorn University demonstrated the dogs’ ability to screen patients.
The Rot Dom Wai (รถดมไว), which in English translates to the Dog Olfactory Mobile Vehicle for Viral Inspection, is a mobile laboratory equipped with sterilization equipment and devices to hold samples for the dogs to sniff. The vehicle is now ready to be deployed.
“Dogs are 50 times more capable of smelling than humans, that’s why we came up with the research,” Professor Dr Kaywalee Chatdarong, the associate dean for the Research and Innovation at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine at Chulalongkorn University and the head of the research project, said earlier this year.
This latest innovation by the university’s Faculty of Engineering came after researchers at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine trained six Labrador retrievers, Angel, Bobby, Bravo, Apollo, Tiger, and Nasa, to detect Covid-19 in asymptomatic patients through their sweat samples.
The project is a collaboration between the university’s Faculties of Veterinary Medicine, Medicine, Science, and Engineering, along with Chevron and consulting firm PQA Associates. It is Thailand’s first Covid-19 dog sniffing unit.
“The [Labrador] breed is a long-nosed dog, has a sensitive and good sense of smell, and their personalities are friendly and easy to train,” Kaywalee said. Sniffer dogs are also known to work much faster and are far less expensive than the widely used PCR tests.
Angel and the others can accurately detect the virus from sweat samples 96.2 per cent of the time in controlled settings, according to the researchers.
Each person’s sweat scent reflects a wealth of information about the individual and their health. Covid-19 patients have an altered metabolic process, causing a change in the secretions from sweat glands that can be detected by the dogs.
Rot Dom Wai will be divided into four sections: a multipurpose room, dog room, sample preparation room and the operating room, where the dogs will smell the arranged samples. The dogs walk past 12 sample cylinders per session.
“If the dogs do not detect the smell of Covid-19 in the patient’s sweat, they will walk past it. But when Covid-19 is detected, the dogs will sit down” in front of the sample, Assistant Professor Juthamas Ratanavaraporn of the Faculty of Engineering explained. Any patients identified by the dogs will then be screened by PCR test.
“This will make the testing process much faster and efficient, as well as greatly reduce the burden of using PCR swabs for every screening,” the assistant professor added.
In total, 600 to 1,000 samples can be examined per day by the canine team.
”This will be another breakthrough that will help us to prevent and control the disease,” said Dr Vichan Pawan, the head of International Infectious Disease Control of Thailand’s Department of Disease Control (DDC). The dog unit “will be used in conjunction with the Covid-19 screening processes to proactively work in the communities where the outbreak occurs,” he said at the ceremony Thursday.
Photos Credit: EngineLife and Chulalongkorn University