Detection dogs

There was an interview on BBC Breakfast last week with a detection dog, or, strictly, with someone from Medical Detection Dogs, accompanied by a detection dog.  

Dogs have been used to "sniff out" malaria and Parkinson's, and there are investigations into whether they can be trained to detect COVID-19.

There are details of that trial, which involves the University of Durham, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and Medical Detection Dogs, on this Government webpage. 

So what is in the literature?    A PubMed search for detection dog finds some papers, but also a lot about detecting things in dogs and a lot about using dogs in forensic work.   There seems to be no single MeSH term, and the MeSH term Animal Assisted Therapy retrieves a lot about companion animals, equine therapy, and the like.

So I resorted to a phrase search "detection dogs", not a tactic I would usually recommend in PubMed.   Here are the results, 104 at the time of writing this post.   Some are about dogs being used to detect drugs or explosives, or being used in forensic work or to detect other animals, but there are papers about using dogs to detect viruses, biomarkers for lung cancer, malaria, P. Aeruginosa and blood sugar.   45 of those papers are free to read (use the filter on the left of the results),  others may be available through your library, if you are in HE or the NHS.   

I tried the MeSH term Animal Assisted Therapy in combination with detection, but that finds few.  That same MeSH with words like malaria or glycaemia finds nothing but in combination with other words might find some.    I did find the synonym bio-detection dog, but that finds no more.   But, adding in the two singular forms detection dog, biodetection dog (as phrases), though, does find 121 in total.