News has just broken that scientists are making more positive strides in the area of early cancer detection. Succour has apparently come by way of the dog, man's best friend.

In a new scientific study, to be published in the March 2006 issue of the journal Cancer Therapies, researchers reveal scientific evidence that a dog's advanced scenting ability can actually enable it to distinguish patients with early and late-stage lung and breast cancers by smelling their exhaled breath.
In this study, which was conducted in California, five household dogs were trained, within a mere three-week period, to detect these cancers.

For the study, a control sample of 83 cancer-free patients was used along with 86 lung and breast cancer patients who had been recently conventionally diagnosed through biopsy-confirmed methods like mammograms and CAT scans, and who had not begun chemotherapy treatments.

What the researchers did was this: the dogs were given the breath samples, captured in special tubes, of both the patients and the controls. The dogs were then trained to give a positive ID of a cancer patient by sitting or lying down directly in front of the station containing a cancer patient sample, while completely ignoring the control sample. The results of this study showed that dogs can detect breast and lung cancer with specificity between 88 per cent and 97 per cent.
Wow.

Believe me, the news couldn't have come at a more opportune time. What with the biggest headline grabber of the past week being, of course, the dreary news that the new James Bond's car is set to once again be the Aston Martin. (Call me crazy, but I like my 007s stirring Martinis and driving Porsches.) Still, this doggy news doesn't come as a complete shock. We knew dogs had a keen sense of smell, bless their hearts, to go along with their keen sense of hearing.

Not to be indelicate, but, who among us has not been on the end of an embarrassing crotch-sniff by Fido and wondered what the heck was going through his mind when he was inhaling and simultaneously doling out wet-eyed doggy looks? And who hasn't displayed an irrational fear, even for a split second, when, while waiting in the line at Customs, Bruno, the airport drug-sniffing pooch, sauntered in our direction?

Previous studies have indeed shown that dogs, with their highly developed olfactory senses, have the ability to identify bladder cancer patients by having a whiff of their urine samples. And there are even those dogs that can find patients with melanomas - remember that first case a while back of the dog who alerted its owner to the presence of skin cancer by constantly sniffing at the owner's skin lesion?

All I can say is thank God scientists thought to home in on this untapped skill man's best friend has within him. With cancers being some of the biggest killer diseases worldwide, any step in the direction of helping us fight them is welcome.

Thank God, too, because, for a dicey few moments there, we were perilously on the verge of going down in the history books as technologically the most advanced of the civilisations, with paradoxically the fewest answers to all the crap that ails us. I mean, seriously, can we find a cure for AIDS? It's high time. And don't get me started on the bloody common cold.
I mean, seriously.

Still, I don't mean to sound like a science/scientists basher. There have been significant discoveries made in my lifetime - and yours - haven't there? Who can seriously go to bed each night without offering up a little prayer for the advent of Viagra? Cialis? Levitra? Do you know how much the world stands to gain now that these pills are here?

Me neither. But I will confess a secret wish that somebody would come up with the conversational version of Viagra because, really, what good is it if you can hold up your front end but can't be trusted to hold up your end of a conversation? Which, I have to say, is more of a problem today than you would imagine (what with people not reading, and simply waiting for the movie to come out).

But, forgive me, I digress.
Dogs, we understand, won't be replacing oncologists anytime soon. There is enough of a margin of error in their identification of the cancers for this innovation to not be considered foolproof.

As Tim Cole, a professor of medical statistics at Imperial College in London, said, "The issue is not whether or not they [dogs] can detect cancer, because clearly they can. The issue is whether you can set up a system whereby they can communicate with you. That requires further ingenuity."

How true. The best option would naturally be to be able to find a cure for cancer. But until then, Rover sniffing it out is the next best bet. And from there, who can say what dogs can tell us. I'm thinking about training them beyond the purposes of science.

Can you picture it? Dogs being trained to sniff out cheating, lying, adulterous men? Imagine interviewing prospective partners and asking them for urine samples. Forget diamonds, a dog could become a girl's best friend. And men, who for centuries have had to live with the ignominious label of 'Dog', could find out, once and for all, who in the relationship more closely shares Stray's baser nature.

The future of gender studies, my friend, could also lie with a dog.

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