Dogs Who Sniff Cancer

Remember how I told you that dogs are way, way better at smelling things than people are?  Well, even though everybody knows this is true, nobody knows exactly how much better dogs can smell stuff than humans can.  One of my in-depth research sources said that a dog's sense of smell is 10,000 times better than a person's, and another in-depth source said it is 100,000 times better!  So since there is a huge gap between these two numbers, I think this means that people just really can't understand at all what it's like to be a dog and to smell so many interesting things all the time.

But anyway, my point is that because dogs can smell so well, they can do all sorts of important work for people if they are just trained to know what people want them to do.  So for instance, dogs can sniff out drugs and bombs and dead people and bedbugs, like I've already told you in some of my other blogs.

And now another thing dogs are sniffing out is cancer.  This is actually something they have been doing for several years already, but new research with dogs sniffing cancer is still going on every day.  Recently, some scientists in Japan trained an 8-year-old black lab named Marine to find colon cancer by smelling a person's breath.  Marine was taught to do this by sniffing some tubes that people had breathed into, and when Marine sniffed the one from the person who had cancer, she was rewarded with a tennis ball, which is something she really loves to play with.  So it didn't take long for her to catch on and start "alerting" every time she smelled the breath sample from a person with colon cancer.

Marine was so good at this that she got the right answer 95 percent of the time with the breath samples, and when she sniffed poop samples, she was right 98 percent of the time.  In the past, other dogs have been taught to identify cancer of the skin, bladder, lung, breast, and ovaries.  And mostly they just do this by sniffing breath samples or urine samples or skin lesions.

So how can dogs smell cancer?  Well, it turns out that cancer makes a certain sort of chemical smell, and this smell might be caused by volatile organic compounds, whatever those are.  Anyway, somehow the cancer makes some sort of chemical waste product stuff which is different from what the body usually makes, and that chemical stuff goes into the blood, and then it gets into the breath, and dogs can smell it there.

I thought that maybe this discovery about how good dogs are at sniffing out cancer would mean that lots of dogs could get jobs in doctors' offices, which would help the canine unemployment situation.  And also that dogs would have a bunch of money to buy yummy dog food and treats with.  But it turns out that the scientists don't want to pay what it would cost to train that many dogs to have cancer-sniffing jobs.  Instead, they want to build some kind of machine that can sniff cancer just like a dog can.  Well, I say good luck with that!

At least the scientists admit that it will be hard to make a machine that's as good a sniffer as a dog.  And this is because, like I told you, nobody really knows how cancer makes those sniffable chemicals.  But if scientists figure out how to make a machine like this, it would be a good way to help people find out early on if they have cancer, when they can probably be cured.  And it would be lots more pleasant to just breathe into a machine than to have somebody cut you open to find out if you have cancer, so that would be another good thing.  Still, if you ask me, people would be much happier to have a dog in the doctor's office to pet and hug, rather than some cold, boring machine.