Deployment of canine scent detection for the screening of COVID-19 on pillowcases of residents in a long-term care setting - a pilot study.
| Autor: | Charles, Marthe, Zurberg, Teresa, Woznow, Tracey, Eckbo, Eric, Asku, Lale, Pescador, Roy, Gomez Navas, Leonardo, O'Neill, Robert, Thompson, Esther, Bryce, Elizabeth |
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BIOSENSORS
PILOT projects REVERSE transcriptase polymerase chain reaction COVID-19 CONFIDENCE intervals NURSING home patients ANIMAL experimentation MEDICAL screening NURSING care facilities COMPARATIVE studies INTER-observer reliability PSYCHOSOCIAL factors PILLOWS SMELL DESCRIPTIVE statistics DATA analysis software DOGS |
| Zdroj: | Canadian Journal of Infection Control / Revue Canadienne de Prévention des Infections; Fall2023, Vol. 38 Issue 3, p128-133, 6p |
| Abstrakt: | Background: Long-term care (LTC) residents have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19 with higher morbidity and mortality. The use of canines for the detection of COVID-19 has been successful in controlled laboratory settings. They have the potential to provide rapid, non-invasive screening in congregate living settings. The ability to assess whether laboratory-trained canines can transfer their scent detection skills to the clinical settings has had limited evaluation. Methods: At Vancouver Coastal Health, two canines were previously trained and validated to differentiate COVID-19 positive and negative PCR samples from breath, sweat and gargle clinical samples from scent stands. Subsequently, they were taught to alert from pillowcases. Following successful validation and in collaboration with a local LTC, the canines performed weekly blind screening of residents' pillowcases during the Omicron wave. Results: A third-party, double-blind validation on pillowcases demonstrated an overall sensitivity of 100%. The specificity was 100% for the first canine and 82.6% for the second canine. Although no clinical cases occurred during the six-week pilot project, the agreement between the two canine teams was 98.4% on room alerts. In addition, the two teams were able to seamlessly transfer their laboratory skill sets to the LTC setting. Conclusion: Third-party evaluation determined that canines could successfully be trained to detect COVID-19 from pillowcases. The canine teams were then able to efficiently shift their skill set from the laboratory into an operational setting. This pilot project supports that the deployment of canine detection in a clinical setting is possible and could be considered in congregate living settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
| Databáze: | Complementary Index |
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