Flick ??After scampering about a sleek glass and aluminium cage, a rat named Riziwan has made a crucial discovery.
In just minutes, Riziwan has positively identified 13 people who may have tuberculosis. The discovery is potentially life-saving news for those whose sputum samples were marked as clear by their local health clinics. But it’s all in a day’s – or rather 15 minutes’ – work for Riziwan and the other giant African pouched rats that work at Belgian organisation Apopo’s TB centre in Morogoro, Tanzania.
Riziwan, now almost a year old, has been trained – almost since birth – to pick up the smell of the disease, which is notoriously difficult to detect.
To carry out his work, Riziwan is placed in a large cage. Into its base, technicians insert a metal bar holding 10 dishes of human sputum, sent to Apopo by a TB clinic. All samples have been heat-treated so there is no risk of infection to either rats or humans. One by one, metal grates in the bottom of the cage are opened to allow Riziwan to sniff each petri dish.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the