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DOGSSMELLGOOD APRIL 3, 2020
AIKEN-AUGUSTA’S MOST SALUBRIOUS NEWSPAPER • FOUNDED IN 2006
Of all the subjects we could have chosen for this issue, why did we choose this topic in the middle of a global pandemic? Because it’s highly relevant. Everyone has heard about the need to distance ourselves from others as a way to deter the spread of the virus sweeping the world. There may be no better way to demonstrate the wisdom behind this advice than to examine a signature trait possessed by dogs. Simply put, dogs smell good. Real good. Even stinky dogs. Depending on the breed, a dog’s sense of smell can be a million times more acute than a human’s. Even breeds not particularly known for their sense of smell can detect odors 100,000 times better than we can. Bloodhounds’ sense of smell is 100 million times better than humans. Dogs don’t accomplish this by some feat of magic. They have the tools. The average dog has something like 220 million smell receptor cells. Bloodhounds have around 300 million. By comparison, humans have only about 5
million smell receptor cells. Understanding ratios of 1 to a hundred million or even to a mere million is not easy. Here’s a comparison that might be easier to grasp. To put it in visual terms, a dog that can smell just 10,000 times better than a human would be like us looking at something a
third of a mile away that a dog can see just as well more than 3,000 miles away. As it turns out, there are plenty of things for dogs to
smell, and that provides a lesson for us all in the midst of the current situation. Adults have, on average, some 1.6 trillion skin cells. We shed these prolifically. Walking through a room or across the yard we leave behind 30,000 to 40,000 skin cells every hour, some one million skin cells every day. No wonder dogs can track people so easily.
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Could someone contract coronavirus from an infected person’s discarded skin cells? No. But the clouds of microscopic skin cells trailing us like the petals a flower girl leaves behind walking down the aisle can open our eyes to the invisible world around us. A single sneeze can unleash 100,000 germs into the immediate vicinity at speeds up to 100 miles per hour, and like skin cells, they’re largely invisible. That doesn’t make them any less dangerous. As noted by Bill Bryson in The Body, “a single droplet of blood no bigger than this o may contain a hundred million Ebola particles, every one of them as lethal as a hand grenade.” LiveScience says “the droplets in a single cough may contain as many as two hundred million individual virus particles.” When it comes to potential threats to our health, size is irrelevant. Seeing the average pathogen would take a microscope, but you can’t fight what you can’t see does not currently apply. We have to take a stand against our invisible enemy. Two items in every well-stocked arsenal: soap and water. +
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