Training rats in Tanzania to detect tuberculosis
NPR's excellent health blog, Shots, has a post today that alerted me to a living, breathing, four-legged tool for diagnosing tuberculosis in low-resource areas: rats.
More specifically, giant African pouched rats -- a rodent that is native to most of Africa and has an excellent sense of smell.
Journalist and photographer Jonathan Kalan reports that a nonprofit organization called APOPO, which has been using the animals for landmine detection, is teaching giant African pouched rats to sniff out tuberculosis in samples of human sputum (mucus from the upper airways).
Kalan explains:
"The team trains the critters with a Pavlovian click-and-reward approach. When the rats are just a few weeks old, technicians teach the animals to associate a click sound with a small bite of mashed bananas and a special pellet of food. The next step is to link the scent of TB with the reward."
http://thestar.blogs.com/worlddaily/2013/05/training-rats-in-tanzania-to-detect-tuberculosis.html
