While researchers already discovered a trained dog’s nose can identify COVID-19 with its scent-detecting capabilities, dogs have now demonstrated they can also sniff out long-term virus symptoms — often called “long COVID” — in patients, researchers in Germany found.
Dogs are “superior smellers” and are already used to detect what the human nose typically cannot from diseases, such as Parkinson’s, cancer and diabetes, to drugs and explosives in public places, according to the American Lung Association.
In a pilot study, scientists discovered the dogs that had been trained to detect COVID-19 in their prior research could identify long COVID patient samples with a “high sensitivity,” according to the work published June 16 in Frontiers in Medicine.
