Mankind’s new best friend? – Giant trained rats

Mankind’s new best friend? – Giant trained rats

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News from the Future! Mankind’s new best friend? – Giant trained rats

Reviled as vermin through the ages, rats are becoming unlikely soldiers in the struggle against two scourges of the developing world: land mines and tuberculosis.

In Mozambique, special squads of raccoon-size rats are sniffing out lethal explosive devices buried across the countryside, remnants of the country’s anticolonial and civil wars of the last century.

In neighboring Tanzania, teams of rats use their twitchy noses to detect TB bacteria in saliva samples from four clinics serving slum neighborhoods. So far this year, the 25 rats trained for the pilot medical project have identified 300 cases of early-stage TB – infections missed by lab technicians with their microscopes. If not for the rodents, many of these victims would have died and others would have spread the disease.

“It’s fair, I think, to call these animals ‘hero rats,’ ” said Bart Weetjens, the Belgian conceiver of both programs.

6 thoughts on “Mankind’s new best friend? – Giant trained rats

  1. dokein says:

    Not sure this is so great an idea… are these not one of the three perils of the Fire Swamps?

  2. Mike says:

    “Sniffing” out landmines? Riiiight. Does finding them involve an explosion?

  3. Dave Bell says:

    Mike wrote:
    “Sniffing” out landmines? Riiiight. Does finding them involve an explosion?”

    Probably not nearly heavy enough to trigger a mine.
    With the olfactory sensitivity suggested in the article, they’re just good explosive detectors…

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