Canine Cancer Catchers in Japan

    While Japan is known to have higher than average rates of stomach cancer, the residents of the town of Kaneyama in Yamagata Prefecture appear to be particularly susceptible to the gastric ailment. The town officials decided to get its 6,000 residents tested. The samples are being checked by specially trained cancer-sniffing dogs who can accurately detect the disease. So far the cancer detection dogs have been able to find signs of cancer with an accuracy of nearly 100 percent.
     The animal’s ability to sniff out the disease can be attributed to the 300 trillion sensors in its nose. In contrast, humans only have 6 million sensors. Pooches also have a second smell receptor that we do not possess. Located at the bottom of their nasal passage, the vomeronasal, or Jacobson's, organ, is powerful enough to smell generally undetectable odors. The dogs can detect parts per trillion — that’s the equivalent of one drop of blood in two Olympic-sized swimming pools. 
      While most dogs can be trained for the task, researchers say the best candidates are pooches that are precise, methodical, quiet, and perhaps even little shy. The training process is similar to how canines are taught to learn any trick - even rewarding them with treats! However, it takes much longer because the dogs have to learn to isolate the "cancer scent" from the thousands of organic compounds in the human body. Although it is expensive and time intensive to train these canine-cancer-catchers, they can sniff out the disease long before the symptoms appear. Dogs just might end up being better friends to us than we could have ever imagined.