Future of coronavirus-sniffer dogs bleak

The future of coronavirus sniffer dogs that started working at Helsinki Airport becomes uncertain as the funding for the project will end in December, reports the Finnish language news consortium Lännen Media on Saturday.

The fourth-month project at a cost of 300,000 euro funded the current trainers and dogs but it will not cover the expenses of training any new sniffer dogs.

Vantaa Deputy Mayor Timo Aronkytö told the Lännen Media that if they arrange training for more dogs, it will cost several hundreds of thousands of euros.

“We will not grant more money before seeing the results of the pilot project,” said Aronkytö.

About one per cent of the samples sniffed by the dogs were found coronavirus positive and the study is going on to find out how accurately the dogs detect the infection.

Four specially trained dogs – Kossi, Miina, ET, and Valo with ability to sniff COVID-19 in people even before showing symptoms, started working at Helsinki Airport in late September.

When passengers arrive at a COVID-19 dog sampling point at the airport, they enter a small, screened area where they would be required to swab their skin with a wipe and drop it into a designated container as instructed. A dog and its handler wait behind a wall where the dog sniff the swabs. The whole procedure takes about a minute.

In spring this year, the University of Helsinki had tested a group of trained sniffer dogs, and found them to be able to learn and work fast and even perform better than the current COVID-19 tests that are based on molecular techniques. The trained dogs had previously been employed to identify different types of cancer.

Dogs can also detect the novel coronavirus from a significantly smaller sample than the commonly used PCR (polymerase chain reaction) tests.