Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what records his Department holds relating to the (a) intended and (b) ultimate use of funding awarded by the Government to the Medical Detection Dogs charity as part of the covid-19 response.

The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’s (LSTHM) letter of application states the intended purposes of the research grant. Annex 2 of the Grant Agreement with LSTHM details the activities that funding be directed towards. The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’s Phase 1 trial report will outline how these funds have been used to determine whether trained dogs can discriminate pre-symptomatic, asymptomatic and mild cases of SARS-CoV-2 from uninfected individuals by their smell, using breath and odour samples.