Giant rats could help fight tuberculosis

LONDON: Giant rats are probably not the first thing that come to mind to tackle tuberculosis but scientists hope their sniffing skills will boost efforts to detect the deadly disease.

Tuberculosis (TB), which is curable and preventable, is one of the world’s deadliest infectious diseases, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), killing 1.7 million people in 2016 and infecting 10.4 million others.

African giant pouched rats, trained by Belgian charity Anti-Persoonsmijnen Ontmijnende Product Ontwikkeling (Apopo), are known for sniffing out landmines in countries from Angola to Cambodia and for detecting TB in East Africa.

Apopo now plans to launch TB-detection facilities in major cities of 30 countries including Vietnam, India and Nigeria.

“One of the best ways to fight TB at source is in major cities that draw a lot of people from the rural areas,” Apopo spokesman James Pursey said.

“It is a vicious circle. You can be reinfected. To fight TB, you have to hit it hard,” he said by phone from Zimbabwe.

Many people get infected in big, densely populated cities and spread the disease to rural areas, according to Pursey.

The rats learn to recognise TB in samples of mucus.

In Tanzania, people in communities where TB is most common, including in prisons, often fail to show up for screening because of a lack of money or awareness, placing a huge burden on health authorities.

“TB is a disease of poverty,” said Pursey. “If nothing changes it can only get worse.”

Apopo has seen the TB detection rate increase by 40% in clinics it has worked with in Tanzania and Mozambique, according to Pursey, who said that using rats to screen did not negate the need for proper diagnostic testing.

While a technician may take four days to detect a case of TB, a trained rat can screen 100 samples in 20 minutes. – Thomson Reuters Foundation