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In laboratories in Tanzania and Nairobi, rats are being trained to sniff out tuberculosis.
Rodents already known to find landmines could change the way we detect disease.
The giant African bag rat is collaborating with scientists from the APOPO project, a Belgian non-profit organization in Tanzania.
A 2016 APOPO study compared accuracy in rats to standard methods used in laboratories, such as smear microscopy, bacterial cultures, and GeneExpert, a rapid tuberculosis test.
“The sensitivity of these rats is high compared to microscopy and compared to other tests, the sensitivity is independent of HIV status,” said Joseph Soka, Program Manager for Tuberculosis at APOPO.
“So you can easily identify tuberculosis in people living with HIV, but these people living with HIV are very difficult to diagnose with standard tests, including microscopic GeneExpert. Please keep that in mind.”
APOPO is already known for training rats to find landmines, but training rats to detect tuberculosis was new territory when it adopted the program in 2008.
Animals currently working at 21 medical centers in Tanzania’s capital city of Dar es Salaam are believed to be able to detect disease earlier than standard methods.
Many developing countries rely heavily on older tuberculosis detection techniques that use microscopes to examine sputum from potentially infected patients. Dhaval Shah, a veterinary pathologist at Pathologists Lancet Kenya, says rats can speed up this process.
“So with traditional testing techniques, it can take anywhere from two hours to 14 days per sample, depending on the technique used,” he said. “Rats can complete testing of 50 samples in less than two hours, which is ideal for remote or remote locations like Mozambique or rural Mozambican locations.”
According to WHO, tuberculosis will kill 1.6 million people in 2021, including 187,000 people living with HIV. The disease is her 13th leading cause of death worldwide and her second leading cause of infectious death after COVID-19.
WHO estimates that 162,000 people (551 cases per 100,000) were infected with tuberculosis in Mozambique in 2018. This figure highlights the need for rapid, reliable and affordable technology to detect the bacteria that cause tuberculosis.
The use of rats is expected to obviate the need for time-consuming microscopy.
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