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Comment by benbristow | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps we could teach dogs to smell it like we teach them to sniff drugs & explosives?

At the moment it isn't terribly important, there's no known intervention that stops the onset of symptoms and there's no treatment that does anything other than address the symptoms.

It's useful to identify it early, but for the most part the early symptoms are mild.

I suspect the only way to develop a method that stops the onset of symptoms is to detect the symptoms really early and figure out what to do from there.

Otherwise there is no way to distinguish between someone who never got cancer and someone who did but had the progression stop before it became a problem.

Yes, that's why I said it would be useful.

We already teach them to sniff USB sticks

Can you elaborate? I can't tell if your post is a joke.

It is real - ironically realer than drug sniffing dogs because they can't use memory sniffing dogs until after they have probable cause since there is no law against high density storage. So they aren't (mis)trained as four legged probable cause generators who respond more to police signaling than actual location.

German police trained 5 dogs to detect electronics and media, and used them on a child molester's home as well as in jails to search for contraband: https://www.sueddeutsche.de/panorama/nrw-spuerhunde-polizei-...

Very true. As mentioned used a lot for pedophile cases. Case in point, Jared Fogel of Subway fame:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/porn-sniffing-dog-helpe...

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