Cliff the beagle can sniff out a dangerous bacterium just by smelling patients--no stool sample or long lab analysis necessary.
By Dan Nosowitz Posted 12.14.2012 at 3:00 pm 5 Comments

Cliff The Dog
Cliff The Dog via BMJ

In hospitals, a nasty little bacterium called Clostridium difficile causes problems for patients--it's highly infectious and can cause diarrhea among people who are already sick. Diagnosing whether a patient has C. diff, as it's called, requires a stool sample, which can take days to analyze. So scientists at the VU University Medical Centre in Amsterdam trained a beagle named Cliff to sniff out the nasty bacterium. The craziest part? Cliff doesn't need to sniff stool samples--he can tell just by walking up to a patient as the patient lies in bed.

You can read the full study over at BMJ.

5 Comments

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Robot
12/14/12 at 3:28 pm

This is excellent medical science that gives the doctors barknoculars into finding disease!! :)

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garthbock
12/14/12 at 3:30 pm

This was done yeas ago with an orange tabby and a golden retriever......the cat comes in and stares at you and then leaves and then the golden retriever comes in with a print out of the results in his mouth........then you get a huge bill for the CAT scan and LAB results.....

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Robot69
12/14/12 at 5:19 pm

That is a awful pun. And by the way it is finding diseases not disease.

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jefro
12/17/12 at 6:57 pm

This is why we need to protect all wildlife and plant life. They all may have uses we don't know about.

Is this Obarkma care?



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