Dogs Can Detect COVID-19 Better Than Tests, Study Shows; Covid Lockdowns and Cancer: Late Diagnosis and Delayed Care Have Led to More Stage 4 Disease, and other C-Virus related stories
Dogs can detect COVID-19 better than tests, study shows
Do you have COVID-19? With a little training, your dog might be more effective at figuring that out than even at-home antigen or sophisticated hospital tests.
Dogs are so good at it, according to a new research review, that they may be ready for mainstream medical use if people didn’t consider this a curiosity rather than a real possibility.
Man’s best friend can be faster, more precise and less expensive at detecting COVID-19 than standard tests, according to the review of a growing number of studies.
Over the past couple of years, “it went from four papers to 29 peer-reviewed studies — that includes more than 400 scientists from over 30 countries and 31,000 samples,” said co-author Tommy Dickey, an emeritus professor of geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
He worked with Heather Junqueira of BioScent, Inc. to gather the findings. BioScent is a Florida-based company that is developing ways to use canine scent detection to screen for health issues.
In detecting COVID, the studies found that trained dogs are as effective as the gold-standard RT-PCR (reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction) tests deployed in hospitals and clinics — if not more so.
Dogs can even identify COVID when it’s obscured by cold and flu viruses.
They are able to do because they have highly evolved noses, with both physical and nerve optimizations for smell. —>READ MORE HERE
Covid Lockdowns and Cancer:
Late diagnosis and delayed care have led to more stage 4 disease.
The damage from Covid lockdowns continues to appear, and another example is an increase in more lethal cancers. A new study in the Lancet finds that patients were more likely to be diagnosed with advanced cancer in 2020 following delays and disruptions in non-Covid healthcare.
Researchers from the American Cancer Society compared the change in the stage of new cancer diagnoses in the U.S. in 2019 versus 2020. Early in the pandemic, routine healthcare was disrupted as hospitals prepared for a surge of Covid patients that didn’t materialize in most places. States also suspended “elective” care, including cancer screenings
While most physician offices reopened in summer 2020, many faced a backlog of patients, which delayed screenings, exams and treatment. Some patients also delayed doctors’ visits for symptoms that may have been caused by undiagnosed cancers because they were afraid of catching Covid.
As a result, patients were 5.4% less likely to be diagnosed with a stage 1 cancer and 7.4% more likely to be diagnosed with a stage 4 cancer in 2020 than in 2019, according to the Lancet study. The biggest relative increase for stage 4 disease occurred for liver (13%), stomach (13%), prostate (14%) and thyroid (19%) cancers.
The study also notes that “due to safety concerns, guidelines often recommended postponing elective outpatient procedures for patients deemed to have less aggressive disease, and most endoscopy centres mandated patients to have COVID-19 tests before procedures after their re-opening,” which “might have created additional obstacles for patients.” —>READ MORE HERE
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USA TODAY: Coronavirus Updates
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NEW YORK POST: Coronavirus The Latest
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