Doctor Dog

Dogs trained to sniff out COVID-19 in Chile. César Cortés , via Wikimedia Commons. Distributed under a CC BY-SA 2.0 license.

The first report of a dog alerting its owner of disease, published in 1989, described a dog that persistently sniffed and bit at a mole on its owner’s leg, which turned out to be a melanoma. That raised the idea that cancer, and other diseases, might be detectable by smell, and that dogs could be used as diagnostic tools. In a new review paper, researchers evaluated studies where dogs were used to detect diseases affecting humans, other animals, and plants. Dogs show potential for disease detection but more research is needed to understand how and where they could most effectively be deployed.

Read the whole story at my Animal Minds blog: Can Dogs Sniff Out Disease?