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DOGS TRAINED TO SNIFF OUT BLADDER CANCER
Dog walkers know the canine habit of sniffing lamp posts for urine only too well. Now, in a novel experiment, a team of scientists and dog trainers have put this traditional canine behaviour to good use - sniffing human urine to detect bladder cancer sufferers. The researchers hope that analysis and identification of the characteristic chemical odorants may lead to non-invasive, early-detection screening methods for bladder cancer in the future. The study's lead author, Carolyn Willis, from Amersham Hospital in the UK, says, "There had been a series of anecdotal stories about patients whose pet dogs had aroused concern by continually sniffing their moles, which actually turned out to be cancerous. "I was pretty skeptical and needed to design a simple experiment to test it." The impracticalities of training dogs to detect skin cancer using skin biopsies led Willis and colleagues to consider trying bladder cancer detection, using easily obtainable urine samples. The group used urine samples from 36 patients with bladder cancer, and 108 control samples from cancer-free individuals. Six dogs of varying ages and breeds underwent a seven month training course in cancer detection, carried out by trainers from Hearing Dogs for the Deaf.
I don’t need a wristwatch. I have a bladder to tell me what time it is.
If you look at the detection gear of a dog, is it any wonder, they have the ability to sniff out contraband at customs, and the demise of foxes? Their snout precedes them and represents three quarters of their cranium.
Barbara Streisand, when she is performing with her fellow, large proboscis wearing warbler, and piano player, Barry Manilow, will often, ‘slip out on stage’, together ( I might add, not like Janet Jackson and JT at last years Superbowl ) back to back, and do an impression of a well-formed, pickaxe. Both, vouch for the fact, their flaring ‘bugles’ and keen sense of smell for success, has kept them at the top of their, now, somewhat, tired performances for almost, and since, four decades, or more. Miss Streisand, said recently, at a Beverly Hills charity dinner she forgot to attend, that she, (that is ‘herself’) and, Mr Dustin Hoffman, “ Must be the luckiest Jews in the world”.
‘Smack me over my giant “Hooter” with a cricket bat’ Streisand, has had,…. more duets…. than Noah, and her adorable ‘conk’ has always been the envy of Hollywood and homosexuals.
You notice of course, that Mr Manilow, never sports a moustache, simply, because, nothing grows in the shade.
A dog’s sense of smell is 25 times more astute than, say,… that of a human. Making the canines, successfully equipped to assist Police in forensics, and find ‘holed up’ criminals. Yet, tell me this. How is it? An Afghan hound, to this day, has never found, Bin Laden?
If it were at all possible to train a dog to find out if a patient may have a cancerous tumour, for instance, then why, pray, for pity’s sake, didn’t the Queens corgis, detect Paul Burrell, earlier on?
Geri Halliwell got herself a dog, when she started to put weight back on. Why? Because, she was already sick of having, ‘Spaniel’s ears’. Well done, Geri, “ We like your ‘chubbies” now. Nobody, likes carrier bags full of marbles.
I remember a song back in the seventies, called, “Me and you, and a dog named ‘Boo’.”
Imagine, calling the daft mutt, first thing in the morning, from your front door, and frightening the frickin’ wits out of an adjacent bus queue?
A man’s best friend?
Not………….. when it suffers from amnesia. You know. Digs up the entire garden, because it forgot, where it buried your wife’s dildo, that, it first mistook for a bone.
Black American rappers like to call each other ‘Dog’. Why? May I hazard a guess? Is it something to do with having lots of ‘bitches’? I love rap, but I never understood why they like the N-word so much, in the lyrics? Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X, would be turning in their grave. Fighting to the death so they need not to be called that. Apparently, they keep in the company of ‘Hoe’s’. I have one on the end of some wood and keep it in the shed only to get my hands on it to tickle underneath with occasionally when it’s dry. You can’t beat a good hoe unless it is broke. Hoes aren’t the same as whores. I like paddling with a couple on the river. I can pull whores with no trouble but often get blisters on my fingers rubbing my hands on the shaft too often. Gentle strokes are better. It’s simply all rowlocks, you understand. Slip the shaft in and yank back and forth until you get going. It’s harder to do this inside an inflatable with your knees up by your ears.
Mind you, ‘political correctness’ is out of control, with ‘labelling’ especially, when the whole ethos is supposed to project all cultures as equal. I mean, you can’t sing an ‘Eminem’ rap song with Black folks referred to, as “Afro Caribbean” or of “Mixed Race”.
Is this PC thing out of whack with reality??……… Or does a chicken have lips?
Dog tired of the Dog-matic
When people I meet, insist I use the right term for ethnic people? I end up believing liberal thinkers as being very anal, about such matters. While, we are on the subject, I’m sure dogs don’t look at other dogs, and immediately make judgements of their colour. I use the right term as, ‘labelling’, or as we are so forcibly told, the proper use of the ‘appropriate terminology.” Does a bulldog, look at a male poodle and think, “I bet he’s a poove”? Or, does the poodle look back at the bulldog, and ponder, “Either, that guy is European, or he ran into a wall chasing a cat.”
Does an English Setter, think an Irish Wolfhound, is thick? Does a Border Collie worry, if it is more black, than white?
Have you ever wondered why we have over 3000 different languages as humans, and only dogs speak Portuguese?
I had a friend in the construction industry. He was Irish and the best bricklayer in the South. He was three foot nine with a bicycle pump. A tiny man, and blessed with the intellect of a mollusc. A delightful, pint, of half pint energy. His sleight frame was hardly ever overwhelmed by any building task, whatever the magnitude.
He could lay up to five hundred bricks an hour, on a straight ‘run’. They called him, “Jimmy the Rib”, because there he was, without any doubt in the world, the skinniest guy, with no more meat on him than a glass eye.
He was as thin as a walking toast rack. From the back, and with a spiky black mop, even at sixty years of age, he looked just like a small boy. Indeed, it seemed his trowel was bigger than he. He flashed up and down the ‘line’ laying row after row of bricks, with his spirit level used, only to confirm his eagle eye accuracy and leaving other bricklayers, busting their ‘builder’s bum’, just to keep up. They were left spinning, literally.
“Jimmy the Rib” was sheer music. In fact, he was ballet to music. To see him leave other ‘trowels’, as dizzy as a shitfly, while, he sliced mortar, as if it were mere, shaving cream was a sight to behold.
He was a lovable man, with a speech impediment. He spoke a squeaky Southern Irish drawl, and that was because he had no roof to his mouth. When we broke for lunch, down the ‘boozer’, he used to engage in brisk banter about politics or religion and such. This soon confirmed, that ‘Jimmy’, probably, had no roof to his head, either. He was tenacious debater, and his verbal sparring was about as misinformed as an un-dug potato. I made the error of talking to him at length, about a delicate and universally taboo subject, (when ‘blowing the froth of a couple’) laden with burning issues. We yapped about the Cold War, for global disarmament back then in the eighties, when Thatcherism was at its height, and the futility of the battle for the Falklands left us all thinking the war was, as it was once put, like ‘two bald men fighting over a comb.’
Defiantly, like a dog with a bone, Jimmy nodded from side to side, disinterested in my views on the need to disarm, and so, with a determination only matched by the landlord’s need to evict us, and with much gusto, quite obviously fuelled by enough alcohol to put a rhinoceros away, Jimmy blurted out,
“What this country needs,….. is….. A …..NUCLEAR DETERGENT… Needless to say, I with the rest of the drunken audible, pissed ourselves without any degree of modesty.
This scenario brings me inexorably, and very neatly, to the subject of yet another strange anomaly.
Feedback. That of the above news extract.
The Dogs Bollox.
I think it would be excellent to employ our pet dogs to tell us, if, or maybe, we had cancer or not.
After all, we can train them to fetch our slippers and newspaper, can’t we? I just have one problem with dog ‘diagnosis’. I suppose, it’s acceptable to have a dog sniff potential growths on humans, as a way to detect early ‘primaries, and so on. After all, most of the staff in British hospitals can’t speak English, either. So, as man’s best friend, your little doggie, could make Oncology consultants understand and prescribe chemotherapy.
But, what if the patient has cervical ‘masses’ or, perhaps, testicular fibrous growths? It’s a little different from having a Jehovah’s Witness around your house. When, your dog smells the visitors ‘musk’, and then, starts humping their legs off ‘doggie fashion’.
How do we know if they might be terminally ill, or not?
Just do what all pet lovers do. When your dog becomes amorous with guests, say out loud,
“He, LIKES, you……!”
One Household Tip, for victims of randy dogs, that like to shag your shin, and are already gender/specie confused.
Stick a raw chilli up their arse while offering them some of your cucumber sandwich. Remember our veterinary centre motto. “ A dog is not just for Xmas, make it last longer than the turkey.”
Or, if the dog does not like cucumber, use peanut butter over your girlfriends breasts, as a decoy?
Dogsbody
I get a copy of ‘The Lancet’ regularly, to line my bread bin with, and to be frank, I have never come across any household pet of the ‘Cruft’s’ variety, willing to risk their reputation on such monumental responsibilities, as ‘human prognosis’ and general First Aid. Mind you, I did watch an episode of ‘Lassie’ once. You’ve guessed! Through, a series of well ordered barks, and whimpering noises, she arranged for a helicopter, to arrive just in time to save a family of Hamish people, from storming a ‘Superdrug’ store, specifically, for dental floss and Kirby grips.
Doggie style
If I have to explain this to you, then you are already, ‘doing it wrong’. Please read again.
Footnote:
As a tribute to ‘Jimmy the Rib’.
I asked him once.
“Why are you wearing two hearing aids?”
He said. Pointing, to his left ear, with a brick trowel in hand.
“Because, I can’t hear anything out of this bugger.” (referring, to his ear of course)
Then pointing with the same finger to other ear, he continued,
“And,……….I can’t hear, F*ck-all, out of this one, either!!”
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