Dogs Without Borders

According to the UN, while 55% of the world’s population lives in urban areas, billions of people live in remote and underdeveloped places far away from medical attention. In consequence, half the world’s population has limited access to diagnostics, especially people in remote locations where simple routine exams like mammograms are still a distant reality.

In these remote areas, many premature deaths could be avoided with just a simple test. That is why we partnered with KDOG to create Dogs Without Borders — a first-of-its-kind initiative that uses medical dogs to sniff out disease in remote areas where doctors and diagnostics are out of reach. Dogs Without Borders rescues dogs waiting to die in shelters and trains them to save people in isolated locations.

According to Scientists from the Curie Institute and Kdog, dogs are a reliable diagnostic tool. They can be more accurate than our best diagnostic machines – but way cheaper – which makes them a perfect solution for areas that lack the financial resources and infrastructure to run expensive laboratory equipment.

By just sniffing odor samples from locals, dogs can diagnose diseases before it is too late, saving human lives in consequence.

Detection is possible thanks to a bone-shaped “odor collection kit” that we created and handed to locals with all they need for the collection: visual instructions, soap, gauze and a thermal ziplock bag for the sample. The kit is designed to withstand harsh environments. After collection, the odor samples are sniffed by the dogs. The sooner they sniff them, the sooner patients can be sent for further analysis and treatment.

Since January of this year, we have been taking dogs to diagnose people living in the remotest places, case in point the Amazon forest in Brazil, the Sahara desert in Morocco, and some remote villages in Spain, where the closest hospital is often hundreds of miles away.

Cancer is just the beginning for us, we’re expanding to other diseases and countries.