Passengers arriving at Kigali International Airport in Rwanda can now be tested for covid-19 without inserting swabs into their nose or throat to collect lab samples and waiting for minutes to receive the results.
Instead, the airport is using trained sniffer dogs to detect covid-19 by smelling sweat samples taken from passengers with only cotton patches. The collected samples are then taken to the sniffer booth set up in a separate area.
With an accuracy close to that of a PCR test in about one minute, a dog quickly detects which of the samples in the cabins have covid-19.
This initiative was launched on Friday, June 4, at Kigali International Airport as a three-month pilot with five dogs purchased from Police Dogs Centre Holland B.V., which provides working dogs and related services to police, customs and security companies worldwide.
Rwanda says the sniffer dogs will reduce the time and cost of testing at Kigali International Airport. Rwanda’s Biomedical Center says it planned to increase the use of sniffer dogs in mass gatherings based on the results of this pilot phase, a partnership between Rwanda and Germany.
In July 2020, researchers from Germany trained army sniffer dogs to distinguish between fluid samples from SARS-CoV-2 infected patients and healthy donors
Germany provided the Detection Dog Training System from Kynoscience, a German company that has also trained the dog handlers of the Rwanda National Police Canine Brigade.
It is believed that dogs can distinguish between more than a million different smells, can detect even the finest traces of scent, and just a few molecules are enough to smell a substance to them.
In July 2020, researchers in Germany trained army sniffer dogs to distinguish between fluid samples from SARS-CoV-2 infected patients and healthy donors.
In this particular study, researchers under the leadership of Dr. Esther Schalke, a veterinarian at the German armed forces school for service dogs, and Prof. Holger Volk, Chair of the Department of Small Animal Diseases at the University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover trained eight Bundeswehr (German Army) detection dogs over the period of a week to detect the saliva and secretions from the lungs and trachea of patients who had been infected with SARS-CoV-2.
The 1st Secretary of the German Embassy in Rwanda, Renate Charlotte Lehner, said that Rwanda reaches out to Germany to experiment with the dogs in an effort to contain the spread of the coronavirus and create a solid foundation for future studies to investigate the dogs’ scent and whether they can also be used to differentiate between different times of illness or clinical phenotypes.
Dog expert Hans Ebbers, who is also CEO of Kynoscience, says that there is no special breed, but certain dogs are more talented.
