The giant rats that love avocado and can diagnose deadly TB | Kate Lyons
A team in Tanzania have trained African pouched rats to make life-saving discoveries, sniffing out cases of tuberculosis missed by health clinics
After scampering about a sleek glass and aluminium cage, a rat named Riziwan has made a crucial discovery.
In just minutes, Riziwan has positively identified 13 people who may have tuberculosis. The discovery is potentially life-saving news for those whose sputum samples were marked as clear by their local health clinics. But its all in a days or rather 15 minutes work for Riziwan and the other giant African pouched rats that work at Belgian organisation Apopos TB centre in Morogoro, Tanzania.
Riziwan, now almost a year old, has been trained almost since birth to pick up the smell of the disease, which is notoriously difficult to detect.
To carry out his work, Riziwan is placed in a large cage. Into its base, technicians insert a metal bar holding 10 dishes of human sputum, sent to Apopo by a TB clinic. All samples have been heat-treated so there is no risk of infection to either rats or humans. One by one, metal grates in the bottom of the cage are opened to allow Riziwan to sniff each petri dish.
There is silence among the technicians as Riziwan examines the samples. He moves on quickly from slots one and two, but at the third he pauses and scratches the metal bottom of the cage, indicating that he smells the disease.
At the seventh hole he scratches again, and again at the eighth. This time Harumi Ramadhani, the training supervisor, presses a clicker, meaning Riziwan has correctly identified a control sample from one of the clinics. It earns him a reward of mashed banana, avocado and rat pellets.
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