Short Wave - 'Smell Ya Later, COVID!' How Dogs Are Helping Schools Stay COVID-free

Episode Date: June 22, 2022

A Massachusetts elementary school welcomes "Huntah," the COVID-sniffing dog. Scientist-in-residence Regina Barber talks with NPR science reporter Ari Daniel about how a specialized K-9 unit is helping keep kids in classrooms.For more of Ari's reporting, check out "Dogs trained to sniff out COVID in schools are getting a lot of love for their efforts."You can follow Regina on Twitter @ScienceRegina and Ari on Instagram @mesoplodon_. Email Short Wave at [e-mail] pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, shortwavers, Regina Barber here. And for many of us, the school year is finally wrapping up. It has been a year. The dips and surges of the COVID-19 pandemic have kept us in and out of school and work. What about in your house, Ari? Same. Thankfully for everyone here in my home more in than out.

That's Ari Daniel, science reporter extraordinaire. Hey there, Regina. host extraordinaire. A lot of schools have managed to stay open this year using all kinds of strategies. And I want to talk to you about one community near me that relied on a special program to help keep its classrooms from closing. I visited Freetown Elementary School in southeastern Massachusetts, and there are two police cruisers just outside bouncing feverishly on their shocks. You might think I had like an elephant in the back or something, you know what I mean? But it's a 56-pound lab. Whoa, that's a big dog.

Yes. Captain Paul Douglas runs Bristol County's canine unit, and Hunter is that pup. Hence the bouncing, but do you mean Hunter? No, I mean Hunter. It's like Hunter, but pronounced with the Boston accent, Regina, Hunta. Got it. So she's almost two. She's a black lab, and she is raring to work.

work. Hi, Hunter. Whoa. Hi. Hi. So why was this dog at the school? Well, canine units are best known for sniffing out firearms or narcotics, but Hunter here only has nose for COVID. That is awesome. So today on the show, COVID sniffing pups in schools and where the whole idea came from. You're listening to Shortwave, the Daily Science podcast from NPR. Okay, Ari, so you were at Freetown Elementary in Massachusetts. Yes, and the principal Michael Ward escorts us into the building. He says that the coronavirus turned this year into a real roller coaster in terms of student attendance. You can't educate an empty chair, right? So you want kids in school all the time. He's relied on masking and testing and also Hunter.

She's part of a program that's training dogs to detect COVID on surfaces in schools like this one. Now, the risk of getting infected with COVID by touching a surface is low. but it's not zero. Right. COVID is mostly spread through the air, but with a lot of these kids in close quarters every day, it makes sense that you'd want to take all kinds of precautions. Exactly. We could count on a dog coming on in, and it gives another layer of sense of relief for staff, for students, for myself, and obviously the community at large. So Principal Ward drops us off at this classroom, and Captain Paul Douglas takes me and Hunter into the room.

The students are working at their various math stations. You can say hello to the dog, but first let's have the dog do its job, okay? So what does this look like, the dog at work? Hunter quickly starts sniffing the garbage can and then moves on to book bags and desks. You're just walking around the classroom? Yep. So if the dog indicates on COVID, whether it's on a surface, whether it's on a backpack, whether it's on a jacket, a dog will sit.

So then what we'll do is we'll tell the administration of the school, and they'll spray it down. The superintendent is someone named Richard Medeiros. He told me that across the district, during COVID peaks throughout the school year, Hunter and her canine co-worker Duke were detecting the virus pretty regularly. We would then go back through our health professionals,

through our administration, identify the classroom, identify the space, who was in that location. We would notify parents and families. Obviously, it was a consent piece. So how does this dog communicate it found something? Like, how do they tell the officers, hey, I found COVID over here? Well, there's an interesting example of that, Regina.

Apparently early on, dogs kept sitting near those air filters in the school that a lot of places are using to help clean the air and enclosed spaces. The filters, it turns out, were holding onto more COVID residue, viral junk, basically. than they'd realized. That doesn't mean the virus was active necessarily, but that led to the staff changing the filters more regularly. And so the dogs picked that up. We would not have picked that up on our own. So dogs can find all kinds of sense, but how did this COVID-sniffing idea come about? It's a great story. It starts two decades back when a beetle that was likely a stowaway aboard a ship from overseas, arrived near Savannah, Georgia.

And that stowaway had a stowaway, a fungus. I talked to forensic biologist Julian Mendel about it. It led to over 500 million wild trees destroyed, as well as one-third of the avocado industry, wiped out here in South Florida. That's actually really devastating. I also, I mean, I love avocados too, so that's horrifying. Yes, both for avocado lovers and for the farmers. Mendel is with Florida International University.

As a grad student, he pondered how to detect the fungus before the trees got sick. He figured it was the perfect task for a dog. So we've utilized canine science for ages to do the detection of many things, such as missing people, drugs or explosives. Just like you said, Regina, they can sniff out all sorts of things, and dogs are also used in medicine to detect certain cancers or even imminent seizures. For Mendel, training them to detect the fungus was a logical next scent. Ha, clever.

So let me guess it worked. Yes, it did. Some farmers even adopted the technique to know where to apply fungicide to their trees. After the work with the avocado trees, Hawaii got in touch to help them track down another fungus that was rapidly killing these iconic Hawaiian trees called O'Hia, and the dogs managed to detect it successfully. then in early 2020, COVID comes ashore. We immediately knew that we could take that approach to get into the canines to detect this particular human disease. That's really awesome. So what was the training like?

Well, Mandel and his colleague forensic biologist Dietta Mills gathered masks used by patients with COVID to train the dogs. All of the immune responses to fight off this virus combines to make a unique scent that we see as people breathe out. that we can capture on the masks. After a month of training, the dogs were accurately detecting COVID more than 96% of the time. That's amazing. It really is incredible. Their ability to sniff out these very subtle aromas. Other research groups around the globe have confirmed it and made similar findings.

There's a group in Finland that trained four canines using skin samples collected from people at the Helsinki Airport. And Regina, get this. there was a team in France that worked with dogs that successfully identified COVID in sweat samples collected from people's armpits. I love that story. At least they're sniffing. I just imagine dog sniffing armpits, but it's a better place than where they usually sniffed. Well, if it makes you feel any better, they weren't actually going into the armpits. They had the participants place two sterile surgical compresses under their arms for two minutes. Wow.

So anyway, the dogs in Florida went on to screen the math. of American Airlines employees returning to work. They helped reopen the Miami Wine and Food Festival by sniffing the masks of a lot of the people that were in line waiting to get in. If the dog smelled COVID on the mask, that person would then be asked to step out of line to take a rapid test.

That's great. That's like instant. Instant, exactly. And that's part of the advantage is you can just scan very quickly lots of masks or surfaces. Yeah. So when the sheriff of Bristol County in southeastern Massachusetts caught wind of the dog's success, he decided to bring the program to his canine unit.

And the superintendent leapt at the opportunity to screen the county schools starting last September, including Freetown Elementary. Right, and that makes me think of Hunter sniffing around the classroom. Did she actually find any COVID? I'll let Captain Douglas deliver the verdict. This room's clear. She didn't alert to any presence of COVID. and now we're allowing the kids to say hello to Hunter.

Go ahead. You can pet her. It's so cute. Yeah, the kids adore Hunter, that wicked smat COVID detector. Now, this particular school has a pretty clean track record. The principal told me that the dogs only detected it one time on a kid's backpack, and it's possible it was a false positive. But the dogs were finding it regularly earlier this year at other schools, especially during COVID surges.

Superintendent Medeiros thinking, his programs made a real difference. There's a correlation between those instances where we were able to identify a desk in our location, bring a student down, have them tested, and have them test positive. It's no doubt in my mind that it helped us and allowed us to remain open, keep students in schools safely. So are other schools doing this as well? Like, are there COVID-sniffing dogs across the country?

You know, Regina, it really hasn't been that widely adopted yet. It takes work to train the animals and visit a place. often enough to make a difference. But when it's used in concert with other strategies like masking and social distancing, it's one more tool to add to a school's COVID prevention arsenal. And there is an added benefit for some of the students. Hunter is also a certified therapy dog. And the day I was at the school, there was this incident at recess.

And one of the kids had a strong reaction and got pretty upset. The nurse was called to help. And then Captain Douglas happened by in the hallway. COVID scans complete. And the nurse flagged him down. So the student could walk and pet Hunter. They ended up outside. He needed...

And the student recovered. A little bit of Hunter, right, buddy? I'm glad that Hunter was able to make your smile and makes you feel good at the end of the day when you go home, you know, that you... Oh, that's so sweet. ...able to accomplish something, and that meant more to me than anything, so... Douglas gave the student an iron-on canine unit. patch. And the kid held on to it and walked back into the building, calm and safe.

Thank you so much, Ari, for bringing us this story. And as a parent myself, with a couple other parents on the shortwave team, we want to say a huge thanks to all the school districts, teachers, superintendents, and staff who worked so hard to keep our kids in classrooms this year. This story was edited by Gabriel Spitzer, and Giselle Grayson, who is our senior supervising editor. Thomas Liu produced the episode. Rachel Carlson check the facts. I'm Regina Barbara. Thanks for listening to Shortwave the Daily Science podcast from NPR. Well, the dog's name is actually Hunter. It's not Hunter. It's not Hunter? Yeah. Oh, I thought it was legit the accent. Okay, it's Hunter. Okay. Yeah. I'll say Hunter and then you can be like, you mean Hunter?

I know. No, yeah. Okay.