This month we were very fortunate to listen to Pauline Blomfield, CEO and founder of K9 Medical Detection New Zealand. Pauline spoke to us about the research happening here in Dunedin, training dogs to use their amazing sense of smell to detect different cancers in a person’s urine.
Here is a picture of Freida in training
She told us that a dog’s nose is absolutely incredible. Where a human has 5 million scent receptors in their nose, a dog has up to 300 million. The part of a dog’s brain devoted to analysing smell is 40 times greater than ours. Their sense of smell is up to 100,000 times more accurate than a human’s.
Currently clinical trials are carried out to detect bowel and prostate cancers. It is hoped that the trials can be extended to include ovarian cancer, which was particularly interesting to us as a group of women. We think it would be wonderful if New Zealand Zonta clubs could support the research into ovarian cancer detection.
We were very grateful to Pauline for coming to share her work with us. She had a very informative presentation which provoked much discussion around the dinner table. You can read more about the K9 Medical Detection, and meet some of the beautiful dogs at their website: https://www.k9md.org.nz/
Zonta Club of Metropolitan Dunedin 