Turkey Deploys Tracking Dogs To Detect COVID-19 At Airports, Trained By Researchers For Six Months

Illustration of dog training to be able to recognize COVID-19. (Source: AA Photo via Daily Sabah)

JAKARTA - More and more sniffer dogs are being employed to detect cases of COVID-19 as a Turkish security company joins forces with other companies around the world to use K-9 dogs for this purpose.

Although long-term studies are not yet available on sniffer dogs' abilities, scientists believe they may have some sort of accuracy in detecting positive cases.

TAV Security, an Istanbul-based company specializing in airport security services, enlisted the help of researchers from the training and research hospitals in the city, as well as at the Cerrahpaşa Faculty of Veterinary Medicine to train working dogs and successfully sniff, dispense explosives and drugs. .

Their strong sense of smell was tested to detect COVID-19 in a study conducted in Turkey for about a year.

At the training facility, trainers provide training to dogs to detect people who have tested positive for the coronavirus. Sweat samples taken from the armpits of people who tested positive for COVID-19 were given to dogs for training, which took about six months.

Trainers say dogs can now tell, or rather signal, the difference between infected and uninfected. When they detected people who tested positive for COVID-19, the dogs were trained to sit in front of them.

Once the training program is complete, the company plans to hire them at airports and similar places. The company's manager, Turgay ahan, told Anadolu Agency (AA) on Wednesday that they set up a dog training facility in 2019 and decided to train them in coronavirus detection after the pandemic gripped the world.

"Their sense of smell is about 100,000 times (more) advanced than that of humans, and they are already used in disease detection in other countries," he told Anadolu Agency as quoted by the Daily Sabah January 12.

ahan admits that dog detection work cannot be compared to polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests and other tests used in the accurate diagnosis of COVID-19, but they can help pinpoint suspicious cases in crowded places.

He said they ran a four-phase study and found that dogs had a 94 percent success rate in detecting positive cases.

Separately, Orkun Kara, a dog trainer at the facility, said they worked with 10 dogs and all of them succeeded to varying degrees in sniffing out positive cases.

"They know the smell of COVID-19 patients and are able to detect cases that come from all variants of the corona virus," he said.

Kara added that dogs can already distinguish eight different odors emitted by explosives, and this would only be the "ninth smell."

"They can detect odors from a distance of 8 to 10 centimeters (3 to 4 inches)," he concluded.