BANGKOK, March 17 (TNA) – Chulalongkorn University said it successfully trained six sniffer dogs to detect the people who have COVID-19 with the high accuracy rate of 95%.
Prof Kaywalee Chatdarong, deputy dean for research and innovation at the university’s Faculty of Veterinary, said the sniffer dogs were trained to detect the people who had COVID-19 but no symptoms. The dogs would be deployed at Suvarnabhumi airport to support COVID-19 screening procedures including body temperature measurement which could detect only COVID-19 cases with a symptom.
The training had been conducted by the faculties of veterinary and medicine at Chulalongkorn University with financial support from Chevron Thailand Exploration and Production Co.
“Dogs’ sense of smell is as much as 50 times better than humans’. So, we use the capability of dogs, especially Labrador Retrievers… They have long nasal cavities and quick and good sense of smell and are friendly and easy to train,” Prof Kaywalee said.
The six trained Labrador Retrievers proved to detect COVID-19 cases with the accuracy rate of as high as 94.8%, comparable to sniffer dogs trained for the same purpose in other countries including Finland, Germany, France and Australia, she said.
“The researchers’ team collected sweat samples from COVID-19 cases. The bodily liquids were proved to be free of the virus. We used cotton and socks to absorb sweat from armpits, put them in cans and had the dogs sniff them. The dogs sat down after sniffing the cans, indicating it could detect infected people who are asymptomatic,” Prof Kaywalee said. (TNA)
