Protecting Cambodia’s landmine detection dogs
Tropical diseases affecting mine detection dogs have disrupted efforts to clear landmines in Cambodia, but a new technique could help keep the dogs healthy and working
By Lucas Huggins, Dr Anson Koehler and Professor Rebecca Traub, University of Melbourne

Cambodia has the second-biggest landmine contamination problem in the modern world, with four to six million mines laid during internal conflicts.

At its worst point in the early 1990s, it was estimated there was one mine or piece of unexploded ordinance per person in the war-torn Southeast Asian nation.
The work of the dogs has sped up the landmine clearing process in Cambodia over the last 19 years. Picture: Getty Images

As a result, Cambodia has a high proportion of physically disabled people in its population, which has a huge impact both socioeconomically and psychologically. And these are some of the key factors contributing to the country’s poverty.

But since the early 1990s, humanitarian efforts have cleared roughly one million mines, and landmine related injuries and deaths have fallen.
Much of this is thanks to man’s best friend.

Landmine-detection dogs are deployed by the Cambodian Mine Action Center (CMAC) with technical and financial assistance from Norwegian People’s Aid (NPA) and other organisations after the initial support of the Swedish Armed Forces ended in 2003.

The work of the dogs has sped up the clearing process over the last 19 years – working quickly and accurately.

In fact, no dog has ever set-off a landmine.

But the mines aren’t the problem for these dogs. Because of the tropical environment they’re working in, many of the highly trained animals are affected by infections that are transmitted by parasites including ticks, fleas and mosquitoes, which can lead to early death or retirement.

As well as the heartbreak, this comes at a huge cost to NGOs and landmine clearing efforts, as a huge amount of resources are invested to train and deploy these valuable dogs.

Sadly, it’s common that dogs in Southeast Asia are afflicted with a number of vector-borne diseases (VBDs) like tropical canine pancytopenia (ehrlichiosis), babesiosis and ‘surra’ (trypanosomiasis).

There’s a whole range of health risks in the tropics that just aren’t found in temperate climates.

Lucas Huggins’ PhD project is currently exploring the diversity of parasites that infect dogs across Cambodia using the latest molecular techniques, like next-generation sequencing (NGS); both in the stray dog population and in the mine detection dogs.
Full article: https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles ... ction-dogs