RESEARCH: Sniffer dogs could detect malaria in people.

RESEARCH: Sniffer dogs could detect malaria in people.Dogs detect malaria by sniffing socks worn by African children. As the global battle against malaria stalls, scientists may be adding a novel tool to the fight: sniffer dogs. In recent tests trained sniffer dogs successfully diagnosed malaria infections simply by sniffing samples from socks worn briefly by children from a malaria endemic area of West Africa, according to a new study presented at the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASTMH) Annual Meeting. "People with malaria parasites generate distinct odors on their skin and our study found dogs, which have an incredibly sensitive sense of smell, can be trained to detect these odors even when it's just on an article of clothing worn by an infected person," said Steven Lindsay, a public health entomologist at in the Department of Biosciences at Durham University in the United Kingdom and the lead investigator on the study. The research was conducted with colleagues from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), the Medical Research Council Unit The Gambia at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, and experts from a charity, Medical Detection Dogs. The charity has trained dogs to detect a variety of maladies, including prostate cancer and people at risk of slipping into a diabetic coma.