Skip to main content

Sit back, remain, COVID detection! Dogs from Chile report for duty at Santiago Airport

SANTIAGO (Reuters) - At Chile's Santiago International Airport, the task of sniffing out passengers contaminated with COVID-19 falls to the dogs.

When they smell the infection, a team of Golden Retrievers and Labradors sit down to get a treat. The canines wear green jackets "biodetector" with a red cross.

Passengers clean their necks and wrists at an airport health checkpoint with gauze pads that are then placed in glass containers and sent to the dogs to see if they detect COVID-19.

Sniffer dogs are best known for detecting drugs and bombs, but they have also been trained to detect malaria, cancer and Parkinson's disease beforehand.

In the United Arab Emirates and Finland, dogs qualified to detect the novel coronavirus have already begun sniffing passenger samples at airports.

A research recently discovered dogs with 85 percent to 100 percent accuracy can identify infected individuals and rule out infection with 92 percent to 99 percent accuracy.

The dogs were trained by Chile's Carabinero police and Inspector General Esteban Diaz said dogs had more than 3 million olfactory receptors, more than 50 times that of humans, so they were ideally placed to help combat the coronavirus.

Infections in Chile are well down from a high in June, but according to a Reuters count, they have started increasing again with around 2,000 new cases registered on average every day. Chile has 589,189 confirmed cases in total and 16,217 deaths due to the disease. (Graphic: 34pvUyi/ tmsnrt.rs)

Comments

New comments are not allowed.

Popular posts from this blog

Britain's navy in the event of a no-deal Brexit to defend fishing waters

LONDON (Reuters) - In the event that the Brexit transition phase ends on Dec. 31 without an agreement on future relations with the European Union, four Royal Navy patrol ships are on standby to defend Britain's fishing waters, the Ministry of Defence (MOD) said. The step attracted criticism from lawmakers within the Conservative Party of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, but was brushed off by the French government. "Keep calm and carry on," said an Elysée official, using a British wartime slogan. Where no trade agreement is reached, questions are raised about potential skirmishes between British and international fishing vessels, with current transitional rules allowing EU boats access to British waters set to expire by the end of the year. "An MOD spokesman said The MOD has carried out comprehensive training and preparation to ensure that Defence is ready at the end of the Transition Phase for a variety of scenarios. The 80-meter-long navy vessels would h...
Post a Comment
Read more

The CEO of AstraZeneca plans to conduct the latest global COVID-19 vaccine trial: Bloomberg

(Reuters) - An additional global trial to test the effectiveness of its COVID-19 vaccine using a lower dose is likely to be conducted by AstraZeneca, its chief executive was quoted as saying on Thursday amid concerns about the outcome of its late-stage review. AstraZeneca could start a new study to test a lower dose of its vaccine that worked better than a full dosage, Pascal Soriot told Bloomberg News, instead of adding the trial to an existing U.S. phase. "We have to validate this now that we have discovered what looks like a better efficacy, so we need to do an additional study," he said, adding that the latest, likely global, study could be quicker because it would require less subjects as the effectiveness was already established to be high. The news comes as AstraZeneca faces concerns about its success rate that some analysts claim could impede its chances of securing rapid regulatory approval from the U.S. and EU. Several scientists have raised concerns about the r...
Post a Comment
Read more

In 'challenging point' Brexit trade negotiations, British minister says

LONDON (Reuters) - Brexit trade negotiations are in a difficult process, and only if the European Union understands that Britain is a sovereign nation will an agreement be reached, said Business Secretary Alok Sharma. "We're at a critical stage," Sky TV told Sharma. "It is fair to say that we are in a difficult phase, that there are still some difficult problems to solve." "We have always said right from the beginning of this process that only if the EU recognizes that the UK is a sovereign independent nation can an agreement be reached," Sharma said. "It is on the basis of that a deal will be done."
Post a Comment
Read more