Speaker 1: Welcome the prognosis. I'm Laura Carlson. It's day two since
Speaker 1: coronavirus was declared a global pandemic. Our main story. Dogs
Speaker 1: may hold a key to one raveling some of the
Speaker 1: mysteries about the virus. The reason lies in their noses.
Speaker 1: But first, here's what happened today. For the first time
Speaker 1: in months, the most important story in the US is
Speaker 1: not the vicious spread of COVID nineteen through the population. Instead,
Speaker 1: days of protests have rocked the country and some cities
Speaker 1: around the world in response to the death of George Floyd.
Speaker 1: Floyd's is the latest in a series of killings of
Speaker 1: black men and women at the hands of police. While
Speaker 1: the protests have been mostly peaceful, some participants have broken
Speaker 1: store windows and set buildings and cars on fire. The
Speaker 1: police in many cities have also acted with force, driving
Speaker 1: vehicles into crowds, firing rubber bullets at protesters, and arresting journalists.
Speaker 1: The virus may not have been the spark for the protests,
Speaker 1: but it has helped create the conditions that have made
Speaker 1: them so volatile. Unemployment has reached levels not seen since
Speaker 1: the Great Depression. The disease caused by the virus has
Speaker 1: killed over one hundred thousand and disproportionately affected the black community,
Speaker 1: and as the country limps towards reopening, fears about getting
Speaker 1: sick and economic insecurity hang in the air to make
Speaker 1: things worse. Health experts are worried that the large gatherings
Speaker 1: could cause a spike of new infections. Silent carriers of
Speaker 1: the virus could unwittingly infect others as protesters crammed together,
Speaker 1: some without masks. Police in many cities have fired tear
Speaker 1: gas of protesters, which causes widespread coughing. The virus is
Speaker 1: dispersed by microscopic droplets in the air when people cough, sneeze, sing,
Speaker 1: or talk. And now our main story. Dogs have long
Speaker 1: had a positive link with human health. Science has shown
Speaker 1: that the benefits of dog ownership extend from reducing the
Speaker 1: risk of schizophrenia to improving cardiovascular health. But in the
Speaker 1: era of coronavirus, they have other, as yet untapped powers
Speaker 1: to help stop the spread of the virus. Bloomberg Senior
Speaker 1: editor Jason Gale has more. This is Merlin. He's a
Speaker 1: six year old Labrador who trained to be a guide dog,
Speaker 1: but he didn't make the cut. He got distracted by
Speaker 1: his powerful sense of smell, mostly of edible things. Stopping
Speaker 1: Merlin stealing food is a full time job for my kids.
Speaker 1: But what if there was a way of channeling that
Speaker 1: potent sense of smell to get dogs to sniff out
Speaker 1: the coronavirus. Turns out there is. Researchers in Helsinki and
Speaker 1: London are separately training dogs to detect the coronavirus, and
Speaker 1: when you think about it, it's not such a stretch.
Speaker 1: For years, dogs have been routinely used in airports to
Speaker 1: sniff out explosives, drugs and clandestine food. They have also
Speaker 1: been used to detect cancer and toxic mold. At the
Speaker 1: London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Professor James Logan
Speaker 1: has worked with dogs to find malaria. When you have
Speaker 1: an infection and your body order, the smells coming from
Speaker 1: your body change, which is detectable by mosquitoes. So mosquitoes
Speaker 1: find you more attractive when you have a malaria infection,
Speaker 1: and we wondered whether dogs could do the same. So
Speaker 1: we did a study to see whether dogs were able
Speaker 1: to pick up on this smell. And the amazing thing
Speaker 1: about dogs is they've got an incredible sense of smell.
Speaker 1: We've got a very very sensitive nose, but they are
Speaker 1: also able to learn and they can learn smells. James says,
Speaker 1: the dogs are highly effective at identifying people with malaria,
Speaker 1: even those people who aren't displaying any signs of the disease.
Speaker 1: It's opened up a new line of research investigating the
Speaker 1: potential to train cardres of corona catching canines. So we
Speaker 1: know that diseases have orders. We know this. We know
Speaker 1: that respiratory type diseases like influenza, for example, also have
Speaker 1: orders and they're quite things. So um, there is a
Speaker 1: very very good chance that COVID ninety also has a
Speaker 1: distinctive order. And if it does, then I am really
Speaker 1: confident that the dogs would be able to learn that
Speaker 1: smell and detected. In Finland and doctor Anna hum Yorkman
Speaker 1: is a senior researcher in the Department of Equine and
Speaker 1: Small Animal Medicine at the University of Helsinki. She's worked
Speaker 1: with dogs for years and when the pandemic started, it's
Speaker 1: saying natural to test out their smelling pross and we
Speaker 1: were fortunate or unfortunate to have a lot of people
Speaker 1: who had corona in in kind of of our near
Speaker 1: family and friends, so we got a lot of samples
Speaker 1: that we were able to pilot with, and in this
Speaker 1: pilot we could see that the dogs actually had no
Speaker 1: trouble at all uh finding the virus, so they were
Speaker 1: I thought it was actually kind of a an easy
Speaker 1: smell compared to to the different type of cancer as
Speaker 1: they've been smelling before. To be clear, Anna wasn't using
Speaker 1: any old MutS for this experiment. The two dogs she
Speaker 1: put to the test were professional sniffers with proven all
Speaker 1: factory skills. But there's another trait that Anna looks for
Speaker 1: in a detected dog, a good appetite. The thing that
Speaker 1: you you train them with is treats, and if they're
Speaker 1: not very interested in food treats or other like play
Speaker 1: or something like that, it's very hard to get them
Speaker 1: to learn anything. So they don't actually have to be
Speaker 1: a certain breed or a certain age or a certain sex.
Speaker 1: It's mostly these two things that are important. When the
Speaker 1: dogs were put to the test, they detect did the
Speaker 1: coronavirus in two people who had tested negative for COVID,
Speaker 1: and it says she wondered whether it was too big
Speaker 1: a challenge for the poachers, but she gave them the
Speaker 1: benefit of the town. We first thought that, okay, that
Speaker 1: this is maybe not so so easy for the dogs
Speaker 1: because they kind of were not on the They didn't
Speaker 1: have the same opinion about the samples as did the
Speaker 1: tests that had been taken. And since we've been working
Speaker 1: with dogs for for five years, just with biological samples,
Speaker 1: we know that mostly they're rights and we're wrong. So
Speaker 1: An and the colleagues asked those two people to get retested,
Speaker 1: and actually both of them had developed the corona as
Speaker 1: a disease in the meanwhile. So one of them was
Speaker 1: four days tested before and one of them was five
Speaker 1: days tested before, and the dog could smell them then
Speaker 1: already before before kind of the clinical disease erupted in
Speaker 1: the people. Anna is doing more research to verify and
Speaker 1: validate these initial findings. She says more work is needed
Speaker 1: to clarify what the dogs are identifying in patient samples
Speaker 1: and how long the smell stays after the infection has passed,
Speaker 1: but she's hoping to publish the results in a scientific journal,
Speaker 1: and like James Logan in London, she's optimistic about what
Speaker 1: dogs could bring to the COVID screening table given their
Speaker 1: proven utility across the number of areas. We have about
Speaker 1: thirty different kind of professions that dogs do. We have
Speaker 1: dogs that are are alarming for for cancer, for epilepsy,
Speaker 1: for chronic pain, for diabetes patients. We've got dogs that
Speaker 1: are are trained to look for explosives and drugs and
Speaker 1: money and whatnot. So so it's actually not far fetched
Speaker 1: dogs can can do this. So just having a dog
Speaker 1: standing by the customs when when people come into countries,
Speaker 1: for example, they can scan up to one human beings
Speaker 1: an hour. So that's a totally other scale of potential
Speaker 1: that that we're we're seeing in kind of testing people.
Speaker 1: And also it's it's instantly with additional funding, and it
Speaker 1: says it might be possible to train fifty dogs in
Speaker 1: Finland to scout for people carrying the coronavirus, ready for
Speaker 1: when cooler weather later in the year risks bringing a
Speaker 1: new wave of infections. James Logan says it takes about
Speaker 1: four to six weeks to train a dog to seek
Speaker 1: out a new smell. He's hoping to have dogs ready
Speaker 1: to deploy in two to three months for the cost
Speaker 1: of a treat. Recruiting man's best friend to help screen
Speaker 1: for COVID makes a lot of sense, and anyone who
Speaker 1: suffered the indignity of an eye watering swab way up
Speaker 1: the nose can tell you being screened by a dog
Speaker 1: can only be an improvement. That was Jason Gayle in Melbourne,
Speaker 1: And that's our show today. For coverage of the outbreak
Speaker 1: from one and twenty bureaus around the world, visit bloomberg
Speaker 1: dot com Flash Coronavirus and if you like the show,
Speaker 1: please leave us a review and a rating on Apple
Speaker 1: Podcasts or Spotify. It's the best way to help more
Speaker 1: listeners find our global reporting. The Prognosis Daily edition is
Speaker 1: produced by tophor Forehaz, Jordan Gospore, Magnus Hendrickson and me
Speaker 1: Laura Carlson. Today's main story was reported by Jason Gaal,
Speaker 1: Francis Schwartzkoff and fergos O Sullivan. Special thanks to Arabella Gayle,
Speaker 1: Georgie Gayle and their great pup Merlin. Original music by
Speaker 1: Leo Sidron. Our editors are Francesco Levi and Rick Shawn.
Speaker 1: Francesco Levi is Bloomberg's head of Podcasts. Thanks for listening.