In Tanzania, tubercolosis is one of the major problems, aside from stagnant economies and natural disasters. Here, the diagnostic tools available to detect the disease do not meet the demand that the new epidemic is creating.
Funds are also short for providing people with the necessary testing and care for the profilaxis and treatment of tb.
Enter the super-rat. A breed of rats that is very large compared to the commonly known rat. They are highly intelligent and trainable.
Already the rats have been successfully trained to find mines. They have cleared thousands of mines in neighboring Mozambique.
Scientists now are using the rat for training in detecting tubercolosis.
Apparently the rats have an exceptional sense of smell that allow them to detect the infection.
The epidemic in Tanzania is extremely worrisome. 2 out of 3 people will die of the infection, and the disease is becoming resistant to medication. Stopping the spread of disease by isolating infected people is crucial. But how to find them?
The rats are now being trained to sniff the disease. In each and every test of infected tissue samples or sputum the rats have invariably and infallibly found the source of infection. This is particularly valuable since the tests available do not have nearly the same accuracy and are very expensive.
In addition, the rat can detect disease even at subliminal levels when the diagnostic tests could result in a false negative.
What would take all year with conventional tests to do,say to test the entire prison population or a village, the rats would take a few weeks to do.
One example is using the rats to sniff infected prisoners in a large prison environment. Tests available could only do ten tests a day. The rats can spot 20 samples in less than 2 minutes.
Source : al Jazeera 5.31.13
No comments:
Post a Comment