The Dog Sniffer (nose)
On one of the pages on this site, I refer to Lennie’s incredible sense of smell. Lennie is not alone, since all dogs possess the same attribute. This is why first-responders use dogs to find people in rubble, as they did in the Oklahoma City Bombing, and for a wide variety of needs that dogs do thousands of times better than us humans. Here is an article published by Megan Moletni in Wired about just how incredible there sense of smell is. I am placing some text from the article here, along with the link to the article so you can read all of it for yourself. Megan did an incredible job! Thank you, Megan!
Megan writes the following: Dogs possess a sense of smell many times more sensitive than even the most advanced man-made instrument. Just how powerful is a pupper schnoz? Powerful enough to detect substances at concentrations of one part per trillion—a single drop of liquid in 20 Olympic-size swimming pools. With training, dogs can sniff out bombs and drugs, pursue suspects, and find dead bodies. And more and more, they’re being used experimentally to detect human disease—cancer, diabetes, tuberculosis, and now, malaria—from smell alone.
On Monday, researchers presented these latest results at the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene annual meeting in New Orleans. In double-blind lab tests, two canines proved able to correctly pick out the scent of children infected with malaria parasites 70 percent of the time. While all the schoolchildren appeared healthy, blood tests administered on-site discovered that 30 children were actually carrying the disease. This work is just a proof of concept, but the hope is that one day biodetection dogs could be deployed at airports, ports of entry, or other border crossings, to prevent asymptomatic carriers of the parasite that causes malaria from bringing it back into areas where the disease has been eradicated.