Children need to empathize with their pet’s feelings and experience what it’s like to be in their shoes to provide the best care possible. Also, they develop this talent early in life, which serves them well throughout their early development and beyond.

Pets are a great way to teach kids about compassion, another valuable character trait. When children see their pet in pain or ill, they frequently develop strong empathy for the animal. Teaching kids to feel this emotion will serve them well as they mature.

Finally, having a pet may teach kids a lot about responsibility. Feeding, walking, and cleaning up after a pet are all responsibilities that children can take on. This teaches kids they need to put in the effort to care for their pets properly if they want them to be healthy and happy. And pet ownership expands into later life factors, including cognitive development and social aspects of their lives.

But there are important considerations before choosing an appropriate pet for a child. Do your homework to choose the best pet for your family and children.

Hamsters, guinea pigs, rabbits, and fish are all good pets for kids. Children can learn responsibility, patience, and how to care for another living thing by caring for one of these pets. Animal bonding may be more important than you think.

The company of both children and pets is invaluable. Having a pet is a great way for kids to make friends and learn about responsibility and the value of hard work. Because taking care of a pet requires a lot of exercise, pet owners are more likely to be active themselves.

Consider a few things before bringing a pet into your home. Find a pet that is a good fit for you and your family by doing some homework first. For example, if you’re thinking about a dog, what will its size be at maturity and during its early life stages? A small dog may be injured, causing emotional distress in the child. One that is too large at maturity won’t be a good choice.

After settling on a pet, it’s important to make time in your schedule for the basic care of your new companion. Finally, be ready for some more clutter and noise in your home, but it will all be worth seeing the delight on your child’s face.

Yes, bringing a pet into your home for your child will mean your schedule and normal activities may be disrupted for a time. But think about the benefits instead of the few bad things that can happen when kids have pets.

The post Pet Ownership for Children Can Help Them Develop Important Values appeared first on Medika Life.

Diseases such as cystic fibrosis and the infections that may come with it and their seriousness to the lung are usually dependent on airway sampling at 2 to 3-month intervals, which permits bacterial infections to exist and grow. More readily available means of detecting these infections would seem to be a prudent method of ensuring high-quality healthcare for these patients. Might dogs be the answer?

It is now becoming evident that one means of detecting a variety of illnesses, whether viruses, bacteria, or others, may be monitored through the individual’s breath. Breath sampling, therefore, seems to be a desirable means of ongoing evaluation for potential illness or the presence of disease.

One of the most promising non-invasive diagnostic methods that has also attracted great research interest during the last years is breath analysis; the method detects gas-analytes such as exhaled volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and inorganic gases that are considered to be essential biomarkers for various disease types.

This type of analysis provides a less complicated method than procedures such as gastroscopy, laryngoscopy, and coronary angiography. In the process, it increases patient compliance for ongoing evaluation. Where do the dogs fit into this medical evaluation?

Research has indicated that more than 2000 VOCs have been detected in the breath, including hydrocarbons, alcohol, ketones, certain acids, aromatic compounds, sulfides, and other substances. These substances in the breath are associated with the environment and the person’s habits and can also be created by body temperature and metabolism.

Those VOCs produced in the airway or other parts of the human body are prime for trained dog scent detection. It should be noted that a dog’s scent detection can be more significant than 40 times a human’s ability to sense a scent. Some estimates place a dog’s sensitivity in this area at up to 10K that of humans, depending on the breed and the situation.

In 1989, the first report of a dog sniffing out its owner’s melanoma was reported. The woman had a pigmented lesion on her thigh, which had been removed and confirmed to be malignant melanoma.

She had been alerted to a problem by her dog repeatedly sniffing at the mole, and, at one time, the dog attempted to bite off the lesion when the patient wore shorts. Undoubtedly, the dog’s actions were primed by the scent of cancer, and it was trying to aid its owner. It has been noted that dogs frequently will smell and lick infected wounds.

What about stress? Breath and sweat samples have been used in recent studies to train dogs to differentiate between samples of stressed individual odors and those of blank samples.

Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the breath and sweat of stressed individuals were accurately detected between 90 to 96% of the time by trained dogs, indicating an understanding of the dog’s ability to detect stress. The researchers suggested that this ability to detect stress would be especially valuable for individuals with emotional support dogs or service dogs that could help them through periods of emotional turmoil with their support.

If a dog can detect stress because of the VOCs detected, would it be reasonable that they could also detect other emotions? The question will prompt others to research an extension of this study and may turn up some intriguing answers regarding the place of dogs in medicine and our emotional lives.

Considering the ability of dogs to be loving, faithful medical assets, can we make a case for dog ownership by healthy individuals even where dogs may not be permitted?

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You may already know about the smell-sensing abilities of dogs. But dogs are not the champion in the sniffing arena. Smithsonian Magazine describes this animal as a walking dictionary of odors. Do you know to what animal it refers?

If you guessed the elephant, you are correct. Writing in Smithsonian Magazine, Paul Waggoner, associate director of the Canine Detection Research Institute at Auburn University, adds that rats and mice smell at least as well as dogs, and jackals are uncanny.

But for attitude? Your German shepherd prevails over those other animals. The problem? Training and keeping a detection dog is challenging and not cheap. Researchers are turning to mice, locusts, honeybees, and other animals in this context.

Cancer detection — Enter the ant

“Am I as admirable as that ant?”
― Nobuyuki Fukumoto, Saikyō Densetsu Kurosawa 11

Having been blessed to have studied with the late pioneer of evolutionary biology, E.O. Wilson, and his colleague Bert Hölldobler, I am fascinated with ants.

As a doctor specializing in cancer, you can imagine my delight at seeing this headline: “Cancer-sniffing ants prove as accurate as dogs in detecting disease.”

Scientists in France have shown they can rapidly train a specific ant species to detect cancer cells. Moreover, the accuracy of the insects is equivalent to that seen in other bio-detection heroes, including dogs.

The new study examines the ant species Formica fusca. Could these ants be trained? The researchers already knew that ants can home in on particular volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and that certain cancer types are identifiable by their unique VOCs.

Can these two observations be combined? In other words, can ants be trained to detect cancer cells?

In as few as three training trials, the ants learned to differentiate between cancer and non-cancer cells with an accuracy similar to that seen in dog studies.

The researchers concluded:

“Formica fusca ants can detect the VOCs emitted by cancer cells. A conditioning protocol based on only three training trials was sufficient for ants to associate cell-derived VOCs with a reward. Ants were able to i) perceive the presence of cells in a medium, ii) differentiate cancerous VOCs from non-cancerous ones, and iii) differentiate between two cancerous samples based on VOCs.”

The ants appear to be as good at detecting cancer as their canine counterparts. However, ants require only 30 minutes of training (over a training time of about three days), while dogs generally take 6 to 12 months.

Remarkably, the ants could distinguish between two different forms of breast cancer: The most favorable form (Luminal A)and a more aggressive one (“triple-negative”), respectively.

The researchers, referencing historical ant training investigations, believe that individual ants can be used to detect cancer cells up to nine times before their conditioned responses begin to wane.

This study is proof of concept, as numerous problems would need to be solved before ants can help detect cancer in the real world. Still, I am delighted that ants have demonstrated one more remarkable ability.

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The Food Network & Cooking Channel South Beach Wine and Food Festival is celebrating its 20th anniversary. Our divided world comes together united by delicious food and spirits. Guests can eat, drink and raise money for Florida International University Chaplin School of Hospitality.

Having dogs sniff for Covid is not as crazy as it sounds. The Miami Heat tested out the use of coronavirus-sniffing dogs to help screen fans for entry to basketball games. Now, the well-trained dogs are helping thousands of people enjoy all the South Beach Wine and Food Festival has to offer.

The South Beach Wine & Food Festival is working hard to make the 20th anniversary special in Miami. As guests arrive, the dogs weave and mingle through the lines with their handlers. The canine crew searches for the smell of Covid, which they detect on the skin.

When the dogs detect the Covid scent, they calmly sit down to notify the handler of a potential case. The handler then directs the guest to a conveniently located tent. The guest can undergo a rapid Covid test before returning to the festival.

Dogs are only one part of the Covid surveillance team. One thousand five hundred students from Florida International University are performing temperature checks, encouraging maks, and sanitizing the festival area.

The festival runs May 20-23 in Miami Beach. The organizers prepared the video to help guests to understand the safety protocols. All guests require proof of vaccination or a rapid test no more than 72 hours before the event. The event requires mask-wearing, and tables will be arranged more than six feet apart.

Canine Covid sniffers add another layer of protection as the world learns how to function with our new normal. The United Arab Emirates was the first airport to add airport sniffer dogs to detect COVID-19 on passengers. Travelers still underwent Covid PCR testing, but the addition of canine screening helped accurately detect infected travelers.

A small report in Nature showed the dogs’ detection of Covid-19 correlated with PCR testing with 92% accuracy. This level of accuracy means that dogs can accurately screen large groups of people for Covid-19 without the need for mass testing.

The super sniffing abilities of dogs are well-known. Hunters partner with man’s best friend in the search for wild game. Detection dogs are commonplace in airports and customs agencies to detect explosives and illegal drugs. Police train dogs to detect blood or search for victims and suspects. 

While the human nose has five million scent receptors, canine noses have 300 million. Sniffer dogs are trained to detect patterns of volatile organic compounds (VOCs). With Covid-19, researchers have not yet determined what exactly the dogs are smelling. The report in Nature suggests human viral illness creates a distinct pattern of VOCs recognizable to the dogs. 

Published data is scant, but several studies to validate the efficacy of canine screening are in progress. Dr. Riad Sarkis, a Lebanese surgeon at the French St Joseph University in Beirut, is studying the issue in conjunction with the National Veterinary School of Alfort. The preliminary data is encouraging but unpublished at this time. 

Dogs may not be the ultimate answer, but our furry friends add a layer of protection as we test out ways to enjoy life after the pandemic. This innovative step from the South Beach Wine & Food Festival is an excellent example of companies finding ways to get us back to the things we love.

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