| In this week's edition of the Covid Q&A, we look at Covid-sniffing dogs. In hopes of making this very confusing time just a little less so, each week Bloomberg Prognosis is picking one question sent in by readers and putting it to experts in the field. This week's question comes to us from Gail, who is curious about how dogs are able to sniff out Covid-19. Gail asks:
Are dogs trained to detect Covid-19 at risk of getting infected? Covid-sniffing pups are one of the more fun news stories of the past year. The gist is this: Dogs have a far more advanced sense of smell than humans—between 10,000 and 100,000 times more sensitive. Their use in law enforcement to track drugs and explosives is well-known, and researchers have long experimented with dogs that can smell diseases like diabetes or cancer. So it's not surprising that scientists are now studying whether canines can be useful in ferreting out Covid infections So far, research suggests that they can do so with incredible accuracy.
"Studies confirm that people with coronavirus infections give off unique odors," says Audrey Odom John, division chief of infectious diseases
at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Her group found that specialized machines called mass spectrometers could identify odors that are more abundant in the breath of children with a Covid infection than in uninfected kids. Other groups had the same results with adults.
"We think that these odors come from changes in metabolism in cells infected with coronavirus, or perhaps from changes in the metabolism in immune cells that are responding to the infection," she says.
Dogs are then trained to hunt for those smells. While our four-legged friends wouldn't replace traditional testing, there's growing enthusiasm for the role they could play in crowded places like airports and ballparks.  A dog sniffs out Covid-19 during a training at the national veterinary school of Alfort in Paris. Researchers around the world are training canines to detect the disease. Photographer: Siegfried Modola/Getty Images Europe Now, on to Gail's question about the risk to the animals. John says that in her own study they inactivated the virus before any dogs were exposed to the saliva, so there was no chance of them getting infected. Of course, if a dog were attempting to detect Covid in a real-world setting, that risk scenario would change.
"While there is some risk for the animals, we know that brief encounters like these, especially in well-ventilated areas, are relatively safe," John says. "In addition, while dogs can become infected with the coronavirus, they appear to generally have little to no symptoms."
In other words, the pooch is still probably pretty safe. Thanks to all of you for writing in this week! Next Sunday, we'll be answering the best question we receive again. So if you have any, we want to hear from you. Write to us at CovidQs@bloomberg.net—Kristen V. Brown | 
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