Thread by @Gronnet

Dogs to the rescue! 🦮 @Em23397 Emilie Seyrat et.al’s amazing SARS-CoV-2 sniffer dogs study, now covered by ⁦@TIME⁩ highlighting the enormous potential for fast & accurate screening, of both acute- and #LongCovid.
#viralpersistence time.com/6187403/covid-…

Almost any dog can be trained to do this type of detection in a matter of weeks, @dgrandjean says. “We could have hundreds or thousands of dogs doing this for almost [no money], and they would be as efficient as PCR”

Canines in (this) study detected evidence of the virus in samples from 23 out of 45 Long COVID patients…but not among any of the sweat samples that came from 188 people without Long COVID. That accuracy rate may be an underestimate, says co-author Emilie Seyrat @Em23397 …

…as some sweat samples may have been degraded in the mail.

Here’s the study -

Screening for SARS-CoV-2 Persistence in Long COVID Patients using Sniffer Dogs and Scents from Axillary Sweats Samples

longdom.org/abstract/scree…

The fact that dogs can smell virus-related compounds more than a year after people initially got sick supports that idea (#viralpersistence), says Dominique Salmon-Ceron, an infectious disease specialist at Hôtel-Dieu Hospital in Paris and another author on the Long COVID study.

https://twitter.com/em23397/status/1508751638948982786?s=21

Here’s also the paper from the study using Covid sniffer dogs in Helsinki Airport in 2020.
“Although the dogs identified 98.7% of the negative samples as negative, they indicated four RT-PCR negatives as positives” 🤔

gh.bmj.com/content/7/5/e0…