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If Dogs Can Smell Cancer, Why Don't They Screen People? (scientificamerican.com)
An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a Scientific American report: Dogs can be trained to be cancer-sniffing wizards, using their sensitive noses to detect cancerous fumes wafting from diseased cells. This sniffing is noninvasive and could help diagnose countless people, which begs the question: If these pups are so olfactorily astute, why aren't they screening people for cancer right now? Here's the short answer: Dogs do well in engaging situations, such as helping law enforcement track scents or guiding search-and-rescue teams in disaster areas. But sniffing thousands of samples in which only a handful may be cancerous is challenging work with little positive reinforcement. Moreover, it takes time and energy to train these pups, who, despite extensive preparation, still might miss a diagnosis if they're having a bad day, experts told Live Science.
...something is being emanated into the air and can be detected by a man-made sensor.
The same can be said for drugs and we still use dogs for that.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
The same can be said for drugs and we still use dogs for that.
That's because it is a hard problem to solve and dogs are exquisitely evolved to detect scents. Learning to replicate even a fraction of that functionality will take many years of hard work. And yes, top people are working on it.
Bees are just as good as dogs at sniffing things, including drugs and explosives.
You train the hive ONCE, and they train each other after that.
Unlike dogs, they have much longer working rules. They don't need as much rest or reward.
http://www.seattlepi.com/news/...
http://mentalfloss.com/article...
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Blind tests show that the dog mostly alerts on suspicion from the handler, rather than smelling anything.
And humans of course have almost as good of a nose as a dog. Dogs have a long snout because of the shape of their mouth. Dogs are good at tracking humans because they're close to the ground and don't have a social aversion to sniffing the ground. Humans do well at tracking if you get them to stick their face down there and do it.
Actually no. Skin and lung/throat/mouth cancers are perhaps the easiest to smell, but dogs have been shown capable of relyably detecting a wide range of other cancers as well, along with a wide range of other diseases with no obvious surface symptoms. Presumably anything that alters your body's chemistry has a fair chance of introducing telltale molecules into your sweat, breath, urine, etc. And cancer uses metabolic pathways not normally used by healthy cells (most produce energy in the cytoplasm rather than the mitochondria), which probably means unusual waste products dumped into the blood stream.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Not quite. I have two SAR (Search and Rescue) dogs, and they are able to able to smell things we just plain can't. One dog can cover a 40 acre plot of land and find every human within about a half hour. He's found a dozen people (live and dead), and in many cases, places where ground-pounders and police already cleared. Our other dog is a sent-specific trailing dog and will follow the scent that a human leave along a trail for miles.
In all cases, during training and live searches, the handler has no idea where the subjects are. There is no indication that they can follow -- they lead us.
So -- read up. Your tests are bull shit.