Club Meeting 12th October 2026">Club Meeting 12th October 2026

President Ted welcomed members and today’s speaker Danielle Mills accompanied by her husband Tim.

President Ted introduced Danielle Mills to tell the story of the charity Medical Detection Dogs.

JDanielle Mills related the story of the charity Medical Detection Dogs. Her interest was sparked by the charity being one of the Christmas Charities promoted by the Daily Telegraph in 2014 and discussion with a friend whose dog’s attention revealed a melanoma subsequently confirmed by her doctor.

The Charity was founded in 2008 and has grown over the years by training dogs in two different roles – detection and alerting. We were amazed to learn that dogs have up to 300 million scent receptors which enable their brains to detect odours way beyond human possibilities. The example Danielle gave was that we might be able to detect by smell (NOT taste!) whether a cup of tea had sugar in it or not, whilst a dog could detect the scent of one teaspoon of sugar in an Olympic sized pool!.

JEach disease has its own odour and each dog is trained to recognise one odour. Diseases involved to date include prostate, bowel and breast cancers, UTIs and pseudomonas (cystic fibrosis). Together with medical scientists the aim is to develop a computer based library of the odours of various diseases and a device which can take the place of a dog and be installed in ideally all GP surgeries for instant diagnosis.

Dave Pascoe gave the vote of thanks, congratulating John on his very funny talk and members showed their appreciation with a round of applause.

The other aspect of the charities work is to train and deploy “alert” dogs. These are linked to a specific patient and are trained to alert the patient either to an imminent episode or more routinely to take their medication.

The charity receives no public funding, relying totally on donations and legacies. It needs around £2.5m a year to carry out its work, and it costs around £29000 to train a dog for a typical working life of 9 years. Danielle left leaflets describing its work, and encouraged us to look at its website www.medicaldetectiondogs.org.uk.

After some searching questions confidently answered, Bob Atack gave a vote of thanks and Danielle was applauded for an informative and comprehensive talk.