Who’s a good boy?

Be sure to give Fido an extra pat on the head today after work. That good boy might be able to detect if you have cancer.

Four family dogs – two German shepherds, one Australian shepherd and one Labrador retriever – smelled test tubes containing breath samples of 220 patients, both those with lung cancer and those without it. The dogs were trained to lie down in front of the test tubes where they smelled lung cancer and touch the vial with their noses. According to the study, the dogs successfully identified lung cancer in 71 out of 100 patients with the disease. CNN

The American Cancer Society has embraced the idea.