(p. D4) A small pilot study has shown that dogs can accurately identify socks worn overnight by children infected with malaria parasites — even when the children had cases so mild that they were not feverish.
The study, a collaboration between British and Gambian scientists and the British charity Medical Detection Dogs, was released last week at the annual convention of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.
. . .
The new study, its authors said, does not mean that dogs will replace laboratories. Inexpensive rapid tests for malaria have been available for over a decade; more than 200 million people in dozens of countries are infected each year.
But for sorting through crowds, malaria-sniffing dogs could potentially be very useful.
Some countries and regions that have eliminated the disease share heavily trafficked borders with others that have not. For example, South Africa, Sri Lanka and the island of Zanzibar have no cases but get streams of visitors from Mozambique, India and mainland Tanzania.
And when a region is close to eliminating malaria, dogs could sweep through villages, nosing out silent carriers — people who are not ill but have parasites in their blood that mosquitoes could pass on to others.
. . .
If just one chemical indicated cancer or malaria, “we’d have discovered it by now,” said Claire Guest, who founded Medical Detection Dogs in 2008 and oversaw dog training in the study. “It’s more like a tune of many notes, and the dogs can pick it up.”
For the full commentary see:
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Nov. 5, 2018 [sic], and has the title “Global Health; Dogs Can Detect Malaria. How Useful Is That?”)
A later-published version of the initial “small pilot study” discussed above is: