Dogs can find just about anything with their noses , include bombs , drug , cadaver , bed bugs , and weirdly , whale poop . Now , humankind ’s best friend is being develop to observe malaria in human race by but sniffing their socks .
Malariais a mosquito - borne disease that caused close to 445,000 deaths worldwide in 2016 , according to the World Health Organization ( WHO ) . It ’s especially prevalent in Africa , but it ’s not limited to the continent . As of 2016 , nearly half of the world ’s population was at risk of contracting the disease .
While malaria is curable , initial symptoms may be meek or hard to acknowledge . The disease can come on apace and result in death if it ’s not handle within the first 24 hours . Current symptomatic method are also time - consuming because they require blood sample to be taken and sent off to a laboratory for testing .
In this way , train dogs could provide a potentially lifetime - spare servicing . A group of UK - ground researcher say two trained dogs — a Labrador - golden retriever make Lexi and a Labrador named Sally — were able to break up up the scent of malaria on the socks of infected tike from The Gambia in West Africa . Although their research is still in the early stages , they believe trained dogs could someday be used to serve diagnose malaria more cursorily and keep it from propagate across national perimeter .
“ This could furnish a non - invading way of screen for the disease at ports of entry in a similar way to how sniffer dogs are routinely used to detect fruit and vegetables or drugs at drome , ” lead researcher Steve Lindsay , a professor at Durham University ’s Department of Biosciences , order in astatement .
Their findings are being presented October 29 at the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene Annual Meeting in New Orleans , Louisiana . For their subject area , researchers collected 175 sock sample , some of which belonged to 30 children whose blood examine positive for the malaria parasitePlasmodium falciparum . The dogs , which are keep at the Medical Detection Dogs Greek valerian in Milton Keynes , UK , were able-bodied to accurately categorize 70 per centum of the malaria - infected samples and 90 pct of the non - septic samples .
