Dogs have long been trained to use their exceptional sense of smell to aid in finding missing people, blood, drugs, bombs, and even electronics. Now man’s best friend is about to use its nose for detecting cancer.
The idea that dogs are capable of smelling cancer cells isn’t new, however, recent research is proving just how useful our four-legged friends can be at detecting cancer. Recently, the National Health Service (NHS) in the U.K. has approved the use of cancer smelling dogs in trials, and the UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center in Sacramento, CA has begun a 12-month training program that will teach dogs how to detect head and neck cancers by sniffing saliva, breath and urine samples.
Dog’s sense of smell is thought to be 10,000 to 100,000 times better than human’s sense of smell, as dogs have 300 million sense receptors in their noses compared to the measly 5 million that people have. Scientists have discovered that many diseases and conditions, including cancer, give off scents, which dogs are able to detect.
In a recent interview with NPR, behavioral psychologist and co-founder of Medical Detection Dogs Claire Guest explained “What we’ve now discovered is that lots of diseases and conditions — and cancer included — that they actually have different volatile organic compounds, these smelly compounds, that are associated with them, and dogs can smell them.”
“Our dogs have higher rates of reliability than most of the existing tests. We should not be turning our backs on these highly sensitive bio-detectors just because they have furry coats,” Guest said.
Take a look at the video below to see an adorable Australian Shepherd detect cancer as part of training done by the InSitu Foundation.
Are you amazed by how incredibly gifted dogs are ? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
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