A 2-year-old dog, Pokaa is helping detect the COVID-10 positive cases at the Roselière care home in Kunheim in the northeastern French region of Alsace by merely smelling the sweat of an infected person.
Deployed for work since last week, near the town of Colmar, Pokaa is the first French sniffer dog to be used in the fight against COVID-19. The dog is 48 hours quicker than a PCR laboratory test and by just smelling sweat samples it detects the disease.
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The dog has been trained by the charity Handi’chiens to recognize the protein spike that the coronavirus uses to infect healthy cells and all the COVID-19 variants.
Pokaa has been trained in simply sniffing a piece of cloth which a patient has kept under an armpit for five minutes and comes to sit before a person signaling that person is positive. The patients identified as potentially positive are given PCR tests to confirm the dog’s findings.
The dog has been found to be 100 percent accurate for symptomatic sufferers and 95 percent for those without symptoms. (AW)
