Latin America’s crime-fighting police dogs are being trained to detect COVID-19. In El Salvador, police are using artificial aromas similar to the sweat of a person infected with the coronavirus to train dogs.
“It’s not so easy, because the Covid-19 strains seem to be changing a lot. But the ones that are known have been synthesized and pseudo-aromas have been extracted to train the dogs,” News 18 quoted Wilber Alarcon, a canine handler from the Central American nation’s anti-narcotics police as saying in an AFP report.
Alarcon expects COVID-19 sniffer dogs to soon be patrolling airports, bus terminals and border posts in his country, one of seven to attend the drills in Mexico’s eastern state of Veracruz.
“The dog detects and marks the infected person, a strict biosafety protocol is activated, and you are reducing the risk that a person, or others close to the infected person, may catch the virus,” he was quoted as saying.
Dogs are believed to have up to 300 million olfactory receptors, far more than humans that give them their superior sense of smell.
Studies have suggested that they can detect the virus even in asymptomatic patients.
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