So, How’s Your Smell These Days?

It’s now more common knowledge that losing one’s sense of smell (at least temporarily), is one of the symptoms of having acquired covid-19. Glad to know we can still rely on a dog’s nose.

There may be something into the record number of canine adoptions amid the lockdowns. Their heightened sense of smell ultimately comes in handy for our wellbeing. It’s not to wonder why they seldom look up; they’re too busy smelling the ground they walk upon.

We now have dogs who are able to smell cancer, explosives, & even the virus in most everyone’s mind these days. In fact, the Dubai International airport became the 1^st establishment of its kind to gain international recognition during these times. It is due to their perceived preparedness level for COVID.

They have a number of dogs who are able to detect with @93% accuracy, whether a person has the virus. It doesn’t take a special dog either; even your regular mutt could do it. That’s how dog’s potential to help recognize cancer was found out.

A dog’s owner noticed how often the pet would sniff at the owner’s same leg area. So much so, it was moved to go to a medical specialist. & there it was found out a leg mole had turned into melanoma. A dog’s nose has been rated anywhere between 10-100x more sensitive than our own.

A lot of it has to do with the way odor is processed in dogs vs humans. They have about 300 million smell receptors, while we humans have a comparatively puny six million. Their nasal epithelium is roughly 30x bigger.

Smell-dedicated brain neurons? Dogs have been identified to have anywhere from 220 million to upwards of two billion. The latter is probably reserved for a bloodhound breed. Comparatively, our olfactory neurons are counted to be in the range of 12-40 million.

Let’s put that into human perspective next…