The Indian army claimed Tuesday that it is using specially trained dogs to detect positive cases of the Chinese coronavirus among soldiers, alleging the method is faster than widely-used rapid tests for the virus.
The dogs have sniffed out 22 positive coronavirus cases from 800 samples at an army transit camp in New Delhi so far, Indian Army Lt. Col. Surinder Saini told Press Trust of India (PTI) on February 9.
“Their response time after detection is one second or even less, and accuracy rate is over 90 percent,” Saini, who serves as an instructor at the Indian Army’s dog training facility in Meerut, said.
“The use of such canines in detection of COVID-19 [Chinese coronavirus] can assist in quick and real-time detection of the disease, and help in cutting down [the] scale of RT-PCR [reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction] and rapid antigen tests, both of which take time,” Saini said.
The military has so far trained two dogs — a two-year-old cocker spaniel and a one-year-old chippiparai, a breed of sighthound indigenous to India’s Tamil Nadu state — to detect the Chinese coronavirus by sniffing samples of sweat and urine, senior Indian Army officials told PTI.
“Besides these two dogs, eight other dogs, including four labradors, are also undergoing training,” Saini revealed.
“Army dogs were successfully trained on specific biomarkers emanating from urine and sweat samples of positive patients. These samples do not contain living virus, but only volatile metabolic biomarkers, which the dogs have been trained to detect,” the lieutenant colonel said.
“This is the first time in India that the olfactory capability of canines are being used to detect tissues infected with pathogens releasing volatile metabolic biomarkers,” he added.
Early results from several studies around the world indicate high levels of accuracy by sniffer dogs in detecting traces of the Chinese coronavirus in a person’s system. Scientific researchers caution that peer-review processes and larger-scale studies are still needed to validate the initial findings. Several countries including the U.S., England, Germany, Finland, Russia, Australia, Chile, Lebanon, and Iran have trained sniffer dogs over the past year to detect cases of coronavirus in humans.
The military plans to deploy the trained dogs to a transit camp in northern India, from which troops are sent to high-security border areas, including along India’s Himalayan boundary with China in northern Ladakh state. The two nations are currently engaged in an ongoing border standoff that sparked in Lakdakh’s Galwan Valley last summer.
The Indian Army’s inclusion of the chippiparai sighthound in its virus detection program was part of a concerted effort to train a breed of dog indigenous to India to detect the Chinese coronavirus, a senior Indian army official told PTI on Tuesday. The decision was made as part of the military’s effort to incorporate Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “Aatmanirbhar Bharat,” or “Self-Reliant India,” initiative into the program, the official explained.
Modi launched the “Self-Reliant India” initiative in April 2020 in direct response to the Chinese coronavirus pandemic, which exposed India’s overdependence on its neighbor, China, for trade and manufacturing, according to the prime minister. The campaign encourages Indian businesses to support and develop existing domestic supply chains and foster new ones moving forward.
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