Officials report “100 percent accuracy” in dog sniffing tests for disease The dogs, officials say, not only reconfirm rapid tests taken at the airports but also stop travelers from arguing about the accuracy of the results ISLAMABAD: In Pakistan’s northwestern Peshawar international airport, Beeker and Titli — a Labrador and a Belgian Shepherd — are hard at work sniffing out COVID-19 in inbound travelers with 100 percent accuracy, accompanied by their human medical teams. For every positive test they sniff out, they are rewarded with a ball to play with. Sniffer dogs have been working in teams of two at Islamabad and Peshawar airports, as well as at the Torkham border crossing, to detect and alert medical teams about passengers carrying the virus into Pakistan. “At the moment, we can say their accuracy to identify the positive samples is 100 percent,” Obaid-ur-Rehman Abbasi, chief operating officer at Peshawar Airport, told Arab News. Sniffer dogs have long been used at airports and border points worldwide to sniff out drugs and explosives, but this year a team of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Veterinary Medicine worked to determine if dogs could also be trained to detect the fast-traveling virus. The proof-of-concept study, published in April in the journal PLOS ONE, showed that the virus has an odor that trained dogs can identify in urine and saliva. Earlier this month, Pakistan deployed the sniffer dog teams at the two airports and land route as the third wave of coronavirus swept the country amid fears the highly transmissible Indian variant could arrive from across the border. The dogs, officials say, not only reconfirm rapid tests taken at the airports but also stop travelers from arguing about the accuracy of the results. “The problem for us was that those found COVID-19 positive upon arrival would argue (with authorities) . . . they’d say we are fully vaccinated and have a negative PCR test from before departure . . . how can we test positive here?” Abbasi said, but added that they “cooled down” when the dogs reconfirmed their rapid tests. The procedure is simple. The dogs sniff out the sample from metal funnels, and if they smell the virus, they simply sit down. Abbasi said, laughing: “These dogs are really making our lives easy.”