Cliff The Dogvia BMJ
Cliff the beagle can sniff out a dangerous bacterium just by smelling patients--no stool sample or long lab analysis necessary.
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.
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