i think there is something already known about dogs being able to sniff out certain infections in wounds etc??
or may be cancer
read on…
(CBS) There’s no question dogs are an integral part of the fabric of America. There are more than 65 million dogs – and two in every five American households have dogs as pets. They and their owners pride themselves on their special gifts: brilliant, goofy, gravity-defying dogs.
As different as they are, they share one common trait. They know their owners. In fact, chances are, if you own a dog, your pet is paying closer attention to you, your state of mind, and even your health than you pay to yourself.
“When I come in, in the evening, my dog always comes over, and just gives a sniff. Why is she doing that? To make sure it’s me? Or to find out where I’ve been,” Correspondent Morley Safer asked Dr. Donald Broom, a researcher at Cambridge University Veterinary School who specializes in those noses.
“It would be of interest to see what you’ve been doing. There would be a lot of information on what you’ve been doing. Your dog knows a lot about you,” says Broom, laughing.
“Their world is a very complex, olfactory world. They are surrounded by a vast array of different things that we are really hardly aware of. It’s full of colors. It’s full of brightnesses, which are smells.”
Broom and fellow researcher Barbara Somerville have set out to prove that the value of that sense of smell may be far greater than anyone realizes. They believe that dogs, with their extraordinary noses, can smell cancer. And they’re not alone.
In September, a leading medical journal in Britain, the BMI, gave its blessing. The journal published the results of the first ever meticulously controlled, double blind, peer-reviewed study on the subject, stating, “The results are unambiguous. Dogs can be trained to recognize and flag bladder cancer.”
Bee is one of the dogs used in the study. She’s a working cocker spaniel trained to smell the odor of the chemical that’s in cancer, in this case, bladder cancer. But can she really?
60 Minutes asked dog trainer Andy Cook, who assisted in the BMI study, to run a test for us. There were six urine samples belonging to patients who are either healthy or suffer from some other disease, and one sample belonging to a patient who actually has bladder cancer. The test was conducted at a hearing-aid dog center near Amersham, England, where the original study took place.
read rest at the link
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/01/06/60minutes/main665263.shtml
