Frankie the Dog: A Man's Bestfriend and Savor

Can dogs be the next advancement in the medical field to detecting patients for cancer? It is widely proven fact that dogs sense of smell is tens of thousands of a human being ability to smell. Dogs can detect odors parts per trillion. Dogs have smell receptors in their brain, it possess up to 300 million of them. This 40 times greater than that of human brain (we only have 6 million receptors).

Inside structure of a dog.

There is always stories on the news about a heroic dog that became a saving grace when it found either a little girl trapped under concrete, or a skier buried under snow during a natural disaster (avalanche, earthquake, tsunami, etc.) Have you ever heard of a dog that can smell the odor of diseases such as cancer on a human? According BBC, a dog name Frankie saved his owner after he smelt the thyroid cancer. Frankie is a German shepherd that was trained to lay down when if he smelt the cancer in a urine sample. If it is clean he was taught to turn away. Scientists are still trying to classify what exactly Frankie smells. Out of the 34 cases Frankie was tested with, 30 he had the correct diagnosis. Two were given false positives, and two were diagnosed already, but Frankie did not smell it. Scientists are hoping to train the dogs to detect things outside of cancer like dangerous infections.

Thyroid cancer.

 

Frankie, the dog, the cancer smeller, the miracle worker.