There will be fans in the seats of AmericanAirlines Arena on Thursday when the Miami Heat play the Los Angeles Clippers—provided they get past the dogs first.
In a plan the professional basketball team has been working on for months, the highly trained dogs will screen every ticketed person who wants to attend the game. The process is simple and quick—individuals will be asked to line up in a screening area before a COVID-19 detection dog is brought in. The dog will then screen everyone in line by simply walking past each person. If the dog detects the active virus, he/she sits down to “signal” to the handlers. Any group who had a signaled member will be denied entry into the arena.
“Detection dogs are not new,” said Matthew Jafarian, the Heat’s executive vice president for business strategy told the Associated Press. “You’ve seen them in airports, they’ve been used in mission critical situations by the police and the military. We’ve used them at the arena for years to detect explosives.”
Jafarian is right—detection dogs are not novel, but their application to COVID-19 is. That being said, the idea has gained momentum and popularity during the last few months.
New university program
Fifteen miles west of the AmericanAirlines Arena, forensic researchers at Florida International University (FIU) used their years of experience researching and identifying odors to help train and improve the ability of COVID-19 detector dogs.
“COVID-19 produces unique odor chemicals and causes metabolic changes in those infected with the virus, resulting in odors that dogs can detect,” explained DeEtta Mills, the director of FIU’s International Forensic Research Institute.
Two of the four COVID-19 canines were previously trained to detect disease odor produced by a specific fungus that killed a significant percentage of avocado trees in South Florida in 2015. The FIU scientists employed the same training method for the detection of COVID-19.
To familiarize the dogs with the COVID-19 scent, researchers used face coverings worn by individuals who tested positive and negative for the virus. Ultraviolet C light was used to inactivate the virus, making the masks safe to handle without altering the COVID-19 odors. Now, be it particles, aerosols or cellular material left by a person infected with coronavirus, the COVID-19 detecting dogs can quickly sweep an area and alert their handler to the presence of any indicative odors.
After completing the final stages of training, researchers have shown the dogs can achieve greater than 90 percent accuracy with low false positives.
FIU’s canine team comprises one Belgian Malinois, a Dutch Shepherd and two small rescue dogs. They will be working on FIU’s campus this spring to help prevent the spread of the virus, and will also begin employment at Florida’s capitol complex next week.
Proof-of-concept study
Instead of using face masks to train their dogs, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine employed a slightly different approach. They used the Training Aid Delivery Device (TADD), a containment vessel developed by military contract research scientist Michele Maughan.
“We had a project many years ago that required that we train dogs to detect a hazardous material, but we needed to expose the dogs only to the odor, not the particulate. After many iterations, I developed the TADD which is a containment vessel that holds the training aid and allows only the odor to escape, keeping the dogs safe,” Maughan explained.
At the onset of the global pandemic, Maughan saw a gap for TADD and worked with the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine to launch a coronavirus scent detection study.
For the study, COVID-19 samples—such as urine, saliva or sweat—were collected from patients in the University of Pennsylvania Health System. The positive samples were then loaded into TADDs, along with a matched negative sample. Other samples were also added to act as “blanks” and distractors.
Preliminary results have been positive, with the nine dogs able to detect positive COVID-19 patients at a high rate, even with patients who are asymptomatic and those who have already cleared the virus from their system.
“This is not just a proof of concept for COVID-19,” said Maughan. “It’s a proof of concept for any biological or respiratory disease that could form an outbreak, whether natural or intentional. We want to come up with validated protocol so that it’s in our repertoire and shared internationally. Similar research is happening now in places like Finland, Germany, France, Chile, Australia, United Arab Emirates and the UK. If there is another coronavirus, flu or even a weaponized pathogen, we can quickly ramp up these dogs or whatever technology ends up becoming a valid detection or screening capability and mobilize that as soon as possible.”
Photo: The COVID-19 detection canine Poncho indicates a positive sample from multiple items presented on a canine training wheel. The Training Aid Delivery Devices attached to each arm of the wheel allow the dog to detect the substance inside, some of which are the proteins that a person produces in response to the virus. Credit: University of Delaware