From Dr. Clair Guest, co-founder of the charity Medical Detection Dogs, based in Buckinghamshire, Great Britain, referring to tests by the Department of Urology at the Humanitas Clinical and Research Center in Milan in which two German shepherds sniffed the urine of 900 men, 360 who had prostate cancer and 540 who did not, to detect the presence or absence of prostate cancer:
These results are spectacular. They offer us further proof that dogs have the ability to detect human cancer.
It is particularly exciting that we have such a high success rate in the detection of prostate cancer, for which the existing tests are woefully inadequate.
The Milan study found one dog got it right in 98.7 percent of the cases, while the other dog got it right in 97.6 percent. Dr. Claire’s early experiment found 93 percent reliability. All of these beat existing prostate cancer screening methodologies by a country mile. As Dr. Claire enthusiastically noted:
Over the years, millions of pounds of NHS funding has been poured into the traditional test methods, and yet there has been little improvement in their reliability. This has caused a huge waste of resources, not to mention the distress to the impacted individuals. Moreover, the detection dogs provide alternative solution that yields consistently accurate results. If our detection dogs were a machine, there would be huge demand for them.
Medical Detection Dogs trains specialist dogs to detect the odor of human disease. The dogs also have a high success rate detecting bladder cancer. The Milan research was published in The Journal of Urology.
http://guernseypress.com/news/uk-news/2015/04/10/dog-cancer-detection-98-reliable/
