Amazing Animals

[JackLuis]

http://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/218/330/mritems/Images/2013/6/4//201364124515493734_20.jpg

'Hero rats' sniff out Tanzania tuberculosis.

Since 2008, a team of 77 African giant pouched rats have helped doctors find cases of tuberculosis in human patients.​

"The World Health Organisation says a single technician [with a microscope] can do 25 samples a day," says Beyene. "And this rat just did 10 samples in a minute."

Their speed is particularly useful when large populations need to be screened quickly. "If you have 5,000 inmates in a prison and you want to check whether each prisoner has TB - if you want to check this with a microscope it takes the whole year," says Beyene. "But with the rats you can do it in just a few weeks."

 

[Handley_Page]

http://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/218/330/mritems/Images/2013/6/4//201364124515493734_20.jpg

'Hero rats' sniff out Tanzania tuberculosis.

Since 2008, a team of 77 African giant pouched rats have helped doctors find cases of tuberculosis in human patients.​

And the rest of the 'free' population goes undetected ?

 

[glynndah]

And the rest of the 'free' population goes undetected ?

I would think the concern would be that those prisoners could be treated and not spread the disease to the outside world via contamination from visitors and prison personnel.

 

[Bramblethorn]

And the rest of the 'free' population goes undetected ?

Remember this is still a trial stage; new medical techniques usually have to go through a couple of phases of testing before they're adopted for general use.

Prisons are a good place for testing something like this, because they tend to have higher rates of TB (confined quarters + inmates tend to have poor health when they come in). Having a captive population might also make life easier from a research perspective - for instance, if the rat sniffs TB that doesn't show up in microscope testing, you might want to come back a few months later and see whether the patient has developed TB in the meantime. Maintaining contact with patients for follow-up work is usually tricky, but not if they're still in prison.

In the end, stuff like TB requires a whole-population strategy. If part of the population gets screened & treated and part of it doesn't, you end up with multi-drug-resistant strains, and then everybody loses.