 |
| The Tanzanian vlei rat (Otomys lacustris) |
According to the founders of this amazing rodents in 1997, they said they saw potential for these abundant rodents with a sense of smell as keen as a dog's but declared that they are less of pestilence and not for consumption as potential meal.
"The biggest obstacle has been the negative perception that people have of the rat," said APOPO director Christophe Cox, whose NGO has been based in Morogoro in Tanzania's eastern highlands since 2000.
Prioi to the fact that about 83,000 landmines have been neutralized in Africa and Asia thanks to these rodents, APOPO said ''saving countless lives where explosives still happen to be laying and kill up to 20,000 people each year most of whom are children.
Extremely of Efficience
"When I first heard about this technique I was a bit shocked, but it proved to be quite efficient, in fact more efficient than the microscopy we use," said Daniel Magesa, a doctor at Pasada Upendano Clinic in the capital Dar es Salaam which now sends APOPO's Morogoro base some 200 human sputum samples every month. Africa accounts for most of the million-plus people who die of TB each year and untreated carriers can infect dozens of others, making speedy detection essential.
"The problem is the concentration of the TB in the samples we have. It is sometimes not concentrated enough for us to see it through the type of microscopy we use, even though it is very modern," Dr. Magesa said.
Today, more than 29 hospitals in Dar es Salaam and Morogoro send the Morogoro lab sputum samples. Another dozen clinics in the Mozambique capital Maputo send samples to an APOPO center opened in that country in 2013.
"The big advantage is how quick the rats are. They can go through 100 samples in about 20 minutes, and this is what a lab technician will take four days to do," said Cox.
During TB detection, rats are presented with a mix of negative and positive samples, the latter decontaminated for safety "but the smell remains", said training director Haruni Ramadhan.
When a rat identifies a "true" positive, it is rewarded with a banana-peanut butter mixture. "We can only reward the rat if we are certain it is right," Ramadhan said.
The negatives are not necessarily suspicious but become "suspect", and subjected to further testing, if the rat reacts.
"Thanks to the rats, we have increased (TB case) detection rates by 40 percent" in the participating clinics, said Cox -- citing the same figure given by Dr. Magesa.
APOPO now employs 222 rats - 108 for demining and 42 TB detectors.
Quiet Faster
The others are breeders or still in training, like Jon Stewart and Stephen Hawking - year-old twins named for the US television star and the British scientist - who are hard at work, poking their noses in soil studded with deactivated mines.
After six to nine months' training, the "HeroRATs", as APOPO calls them, they are sent to Mozambique, Angola and more recently Cambodia to comb former battle zones. At one to 1.5 kilograms, the rats are big enough to attach to a long, thin leash as they scan areas but light enough not to set off mines, which are cleared by human cohorts.
It is very amazing that this African pouched rat's have a long lifespan of about 6-8 years.
Mkumba was reported to hae said :"This is a lot faster than traditional methods, because rats only detect mines while metal detectors will beep for every single piece of scrap,"
The World Health Organization has not, so far, endorsed this TB testing but APOPO, funded mainly by donations, won't stop there. Buoyed by its success, future ideas include trying out rats in detecting cancer and neurodegenerative diseases.