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Andrew Heard's avatar

I was shocked hearing about this type of study. No reasonable person should have thought this was a good idea. Least of all on children. We should never rely on animals to detect diseases.

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krishna e bera's avatar

The article is abourt ethics of running this test on children, not about whether or not to use animals in general.

I heard some animals had become extremely good at detecting diseases. https://www.finavia.fi/en/newsroom/2020/covid-19-dogs-arrive-airport-able-identify-virus-earlier-laboratory-tests

What is your objection to training them and validating the training?

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Andrew Heard's avatar

I know that the study was about testing for CoVid on children. I object to that as well for many reasons, most of them in this article and the first time Vinay spoke about the study.

One of the problems with using animals is mentioned in the article. The idea of false positives being high. My issue with using animals isn’t about using them for the purposes of experimentation.

The biggest problem is that because dogs are independent beings, you can’t be certain that they aren’t introducing subjective experience into the process. Whatever they detect might not be the virus.

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