Three Indian Army dogs sniff out coronavirus based on urine and sweat samples

Within a span of seconds, three dogs that were trained by the Indian Army were able to detect COVID-19 positive samples through sweat and urine samples.

Wednesday February 10, 2021 , 2 min Read

While coronavirus testing has majorly increased across the country, the Indian Army is training their intelligent furry friends to detect the virus by smell.

Three dogs - a cocker spaniel and two local breeds (Chippiparai), are being trained to detect the virus in soldiers before they move for certain operations.

"Based on data from the samples we have tested till now, we can infer that the ability to detect the disease is more than 95 percent among sniffer dogs," Indian Army’s Veterinary Officer, Lt Col Surinder Saini told news agency ANI.

One-year-old Jaya (Chippiparai) and two-year-old Casper were able to identify the infected samples amid the many negative samples. This was during an exercise where the dogs' capabilities were on show, organised by the Army in Delhi.

Sniffer dogs coronavirus — Image: The New Indian Express

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"Medical detection dogs are pretty well established in the western countries. This is for the first time that we used canines in India to detect a human disease when the virus (pathogen) enters the body,” the Colonel told The New Indian Express.

“The pathogen causes damage to tissues leading to emanating volatile metabolic biomarkers in urine and sweat samples. Dogs with their ultra-sensitive olfactory capability can distinguish that once trained," he added.

The sensitivity of Jaya’s and Casper’s smell was obtained from the screening of 279 urine samples and 267 sweat samples, the results of which showed 90 percent accuracy. After the training, the dogs were sent to a Transit Camp in Delhi for the screening of transients in November 2020 where about 806 transients were screened.

They are currently being used for screening of transients moving to operational deployment. So far, more than 3000 samples have been screened by these dogs. About 22 samples have been found to be positive by the dogs.

Seeing the success of the detection by these dogs, more dogs are being trained for the same. “There are eight more dogs undergoing training in the Remount Veterinary Corps (RVC) College and Centre in Meerut, and they will be ready for deployment by March,” said Lt Col Saini.

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Edited by Anju Narayanan