In this week’s doggy advice video we celebrate the amazing Medical Detection Dogs charity and how they train dogs to detect illnesses from psychosis, epileptic fits, Covid, cancers and diabetic sugar spikes. Find out more about them in our blog
Who are the Medical Detection Dogs?
This week’s Down Dog Digestible is all about the charity we support, Medical Detection Dogs (MDD – it’s probably fairly obvious why this charity is close to my heart!)
Dogs noses are so amazing and recently MDD published the results of training dogs to detect COVID – and they were amazing. We talk about how they did the training. The six trained dogs were able to detect people with COVID 90% of the time, which is quite a bit better than the regularly used lateral flow COVID test.
The huge benefit of using dogs to screen people is speed. A dog can check a line of people in just a few minutes, which means fewer queues at airports, or for concerts, or other big outdoor events.
Using a dogs’ superpower to sniff out illnesses
MDD trains dogs for so much more as well. Dogs react differentially to the smells of people according to their emotional states and health. Trained dogs are used to detect psychosis in children and adults, predict epileptic fits, and in alerting diabetics to dangerous blood sugar changes. Medical Detection dogs also work in cancer detection and early detection of neurological diseases such as Parkinsons disease.
A trained dog’s ability to correctly identify or rule-out lung, breast, prostate and colo-rectal cancer, at both early and late stages, is over 90%, often 98%.
There’s also some early work on malaria detection, showing promising results with a 73% detection rate, and on bacterial infection as well.
Well done Medical Detection Dogs. We are so pleased to be supporting your wonderful work.
The puppy we’re supporting is (wonderfully) called Gus. That makes me very happy!
You can find today’s Digestible here along with all the others from previous weeks.
Do you need some doggy advice to help with your beloved pooch?
Please do write in and ask if you have a question you’d love us to answer. I want to make sure these Digestibles answer any doggy queries you have.
Enjoy!
Keep safe,
Carol
