Marshall Brain's Blog

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Little medic has a nose for illness

Here my dog has been sniffing fire hydrants for the last 10 years, and now we come to find out she could have been detecting cancer. From the article:

Ginger correctly selected the cup from a patient with prostate cancer, dismissing specimens from healthy volunteers.

Gordon reached into a pocket for her reward: a piece of chicken.

Ginger didn't always pick the right cup, but the little dog got it right more than half the time on her first pass. On average, she has sustained that accuracy rate during 250 training sessions, Gordon said.

Under way for more than a year, Gordon's Find "Fred" project – his euphemism for a cancer patient – has evolved into a Scripps-approved clinical trial to see if dogs can be trained to detect early signs of human cancer through odor signatures of the disease.

Of course , if there are cancer-caused chemicals in the urine that can change its smell, those same chemicals can be detected in many other ways.