World News for Students of English

28-05-2021 07:00

A study showed that dogs are able to detect COVID-19 in human sweat with stunning accuracy, paving the way for the broader use of sniffing dogs in a global effort to contain the pandemic.

The dogs’ detection reached 97% sensitivity in the French study, which rates the dogs’ ability to identify positive samples. In the case of identifying negative samples, the rate was 91%. The sensitivity rating is more successful than that of many 15-minute antigen tests which tend to be better at ruling out infection than finding it.

The results mean that virus-sniffing dogs could be more widely deployed in airports, train stations, or wherever crowds gather as a way to screen people, much like dogs are used for detecting drugs or bombs. Using dogs also means that COVID-19 could be identified at just a fraction of a second in a non-invasive manner and at a low cost.

Difficult words: contain (to control), rule out (to exclude something as a possibility), antigen (a reaction your body makes to fight off a sickness), non-invasive (not cutting the skin or entering any of the body spaces).

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