Is it possible to have a dog that could detect anthrax and other biological weapons of destruction and have the dog weed out the fakes and phonies from the real McCoys?
And, obviously, in the case of anthrax, you’d have the dog immunized against it.
Could it work? If so, why not start training some dogs to do it and cut down on all the lab work and other stuff?
I’m pretty sure you can’t vaccinate a dog against Anthrax.
Anthrax + Dog = Dead Dog
Just my uneducated guess.
Plus there’s the nagging tidbit that anthrax spores are odorless…
OK, probably nothing is truly odorless. But I’d be willing to bet that the minimum smellable concentration would be larger than the minimum infectious concentration.
Well, at least then you’d know that the letter had anthrax.
I was wondering the same question this afternoon. Assuming anthrax is smellable, couldn’t you keep a dog on continuous antibiotics, quarantined from other dogs so as to prevent transfer of antibiotic-resistant bacteria?
Isn’t it SOP to vaccinate cows for anthrax? If so would the same vaccine work on a dog?
Spores have a thick cell wall which not only protects them from the external environment, but also keeps the cellular contents from leaking out and smelling up the place. A powdered spore or bacterial product is likely to smell mostly like the remaining components of the growth media. Unfortunately the wide variety of media additives in use means that it could smell like just about anything at all, or be nearly odorless.
In Australia recently there have been heaps of hoax Anthrax sightings (for want of a better word). The Police and Fire Brigade turn up and don their masks and protective suits and grab anyone that might have been exposed to the “Anthrax” and stand them under a special portable shower thing in the street and wash them down. The thing that concerns me with this is, what happens if it turns out one of these hoaxes is a Anthrax then all the contaminated water is flowing down the stormwater drain into the lakes and rivers. Isn’t this like potentially very harmful if this muck is going into our waterways? You’re not allowed to wash your car in the street in case of the runoff “poisioning” the waterways, I would of thought that Anthrax would be a tad more harmful than soap suds?
I’d agree with that if I hadn’t seen the experiments where they train dogs to sniff out melanoma and other cancerous objects on the human body… but I did and I believe them. There’s no reason not to believe dogs can smell a whole helluva lot more than we even think they can.
Besides, just tonight Scientific America did an interesting story on this very topic- not anthrax, but other seemingly odorless objects that dogs are able to detect. It was pretty amazing to see what they could find or notice.
I’m not ripping you here, Squink, I’m just wondering if it isn’t all that odorless to a dog, that’s all.
Again, I sure as hell don’t know.
Its probably not just water their hosing them off with (though it could be), but bleach mixed with water in a high enough concentration. In any case, naturally occuring anthrax isn’t all that dangerous. It takes a heck of a lot to infect you and by washing the person off, you’re reducing the odds that they’ll contract the disease if they actually have been exposed to it. Weaponized anthrax is a different story altogether. There’s no treatment for it, and the person’s only hope of survival is to eliminate any chance that they might contaminate themselves with it, if they haven’t been already. One could then, if the tests prove positive, dump whatever chemicals were necessary to kill the stuff off down the drains and around the areas which had been contaminated.
The Moscow Times has this to say about the smell of improperly incubated anthrax:
That said, dried spores are a lot less biologically active (hence smelly) than tumors. That doesn’t mean that it would be impossible for a dog to smell the spores directly, or detect some odorous compound emitted by the spores. It just means that the other components of a dried spore mixture are likely to interfere with a dogs ability to detect spores reliably.
I guess my point is, couldn’t they at least get a dog in there and tone down all the false alarms?
If the dog looks at it and walks away, you can be pretty assured that it isn’t anthrax (So long as the dog has been properly trained).
If the dog alerts on it, then hold the phone, time to take things seriously.
I’m also surprised I haven’t seen this, or any other means of detecting anthrax, mentioned in the media or anywhere else.