It’s National Dog Day. It’s recognized as such by the New York State legislature, and is celebrated by dog lovers around the world.
The National Dog Foundation has a goal of rescuing 10,000 dogs each year. Dogs help law enforcement, they help locate injured people, they can detect certain forms of cancer, and they serve disabled people as seeing eye dogs and hearing ear dogs. Service dogs are sometimes brought to hospitals to visit sick people.
Dogs first appeared in Renaissance paintings in the year 1500. The first Guide Dog School for the blind opened in 1929, in Nashville.
America’s most popular dog breed has long been the Labrador retriever, especially in the 1990s, but in 2022, the French Bulldog became America’s most popular dog breed for the first time.
“Researchers are finding that dogs can sniff out cancer by detecting the markers of breast, colorectal, lung, and other types of cancer,” reports Medical News Today. “Humans have put dogs’ remarkable sense of smell to use by training them to sniff out explosives and narcotics. Their powerful noses can also detect viruses, bacteria, and signs of cancer in a person’s body or bodily fluids”:
Like many other diseases, cancers leave specific traces, or odor signatures, in a person’s body and bodily secretions. Cancer cells, or healthy cells affected by cancer, produce and release these odor signatures….Depending on the type of cancer, dogs are able to detect VOCs in a person’s:
- skin
- breath
- urine
- feces
- sweat
Dogs can detect these odor signatures and, with training, alert people to their presence. People refer to dogs that undergo training to detect certain diseases as medical detection dogs.
A recent medical journal article discusses the “abilities of specifically trained dogs to distinguish samples derived from lung cancer patients of various tumor stages from matched healthy controls.” In short, “olfactory detection of lung cancer by specifically trained dogs” is a “simple and non-invasive tool to detect lung cancer.”
