Dogs are capable of diagnosing malaria by sniffing people's socks!!

Dogs can detect malaria by sniffing people's socks!!

Dogs are now capable to detect malaria parasite

Dogs’ noses could become a powerful machinery in the war against malaria. According to research suggesting that the animals can tell from a sniff of a sock whether someone has the disease or not.

Now researchers say dogs also seem able to identify individuals infected with malaria, even if they are not showing symptoms.

Dogs have previously proved at high accuracy at detecting a range of human diseases, including prostate cancer and thyroid cancer, as well as at alarming people with diabetes that they have low blood sugar.

“Many countries are getting near elimination or have achieved elimination of malaria.For example, recently the extraordinary achievement of Sri Lanka of becoming a malaria free country.” said Steven Lindsay, a public health entomologist at Durham University who led the research. “The question then is how do you keep the place malaria-free, because the mosquitoes aren’t going away.”

The problem, he says, is that while some people fall sick very quickly from malaria, others can carry the parasites without any obvious symptoms. “If you have one in 1,000 people with a malaria parasite, you can’t finger-prick and take blood from 1,000 people to identity that one - you need a non-invasive approach,” he said.

The answer, he says, might lie in the canine nose.

Individuals that are infected with malaria parasites produce odours in their breath and from their skin that are specific signals.

The research, presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene in New Orleans and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, involved asking schoolchildren in the Gambia to wear nylon socks overnight and give a blood sample that was screened for signs of malaria.

The socks were then frozen and packed off to the UK where two dogs – a Labrador and a Labrador-retriever cross – were taught over many months whether the socks had been worn by children with malaria or not.

Socks from 30 from malaria-infected children and 145 uninfected children were used. Crucially, the team note, socks were only used from those with the disease if the child did not have symptoms.

The dogs were then put through their paces by being presented with a small group of the socks at a time, with each sock individually contained within a glass jar. The team watched to see whether the dogs would pause at any of the socks – the sign they had been taught to perform if the sock had been worn by someone with malaria.

The results show that each dog without any fault identified the socks of children with malaria about 70% of the time and effortlessly identified socks worn by uninfected children about 90% of the time.

Lindsay said both dogs struggled to spot malaria-infected socks from children for whom the malaria parasites were not reproducing asexually inside the body. Instead the parasites had reached a different stage in their reproductive cycle, giving rise to cells that, once inside a mosquito, would develop into male and female sex cells.

“It might be that the odours raised by the parasites change if you are at the sexual stage or asexual stage,” said Lindsay, adding that the false positives may have been down to uninfected children sharing a bed with a child with malaria.

Lindsay said this was unlikely that the dogs were simply remembering which socks were which. “That is unlikely because they weren’t capable of identify the sexual parasites – that says to me that they actually know the parasites rather than the fellow individual,” he said.

Lindsay also said that the study was a proof of principle and more needed to be done, including testing the approach with real people rather than socks, and in different regions where there are different marks of malaria parasite.

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