Tanzania: Land mines, tuberculosis – never fear, rats are here
http://www.itbeganinafrica.com/inspiring-people/tanzania-land-mines-tuberculosis-%E2%80%93-never-fear-rats-are-here
Posted by on 25/11/2011
A dynamic duo. Landmine detecting rat Salima and her trainer Abu Chongole
Sokoine University of Agriculture, Tanzania: I’m sitting on a windowsill. It’s a nice windowsill and I like it here.
The terracotta red buildings with their timber-framed screen doors, the pink flowers, the palm trees, my big cousins, which my human friends call cows, are coming along the path, and to my left, in the distance, I can’t see them, because my eyesight is not great, but I can smell, my cousins the camel.
I’m glad we young rats get this time that the Apopo bosses call ‘socialisation’, before we begin our training and then our work.
I’m glad too that my friend Hannah is here and she is letting me lick her hand; this morning she was eating bananas.
I’ve learned so many things already in my life. I was born under the ground in a comfortable dirt place which one day was dug up and then we were introduced to the light.
My siblings and I were then given our names. I am Aaron, and at four weeks we were moved from our mother, we were put in a new cage with a brown clay pot to sleep in, wood to play on and we began to be properly introduced to the world of humans.
This is a place of important learning but it took me a long time to learn its name was Sokoine University of Agriculture (SUA) because everyone calls it ‘Soowa’. I have smelled the fresh cut grass on what is called a football field, the grass cut by young men with machetes, I have seen the different types of vehicles that the students move about in, the tired, beaten looking ones called taxis and the small bright coloured ones which have no windows and doors called tuk-tuks – my favourite being a red one with words in thick pretty writing that said ‘campus shuttle’.
I am an African giant pouched rat, when I start work I will become a Hero Rat. I wonder what role will be chosen for me.
Inside, this building some of my older brothers and sisters are already working. There is a long glass box with many different holes. One by one the holes are opened, inside each hole is a small tub of a clear substance which sick humans cough up when they are in a place I have never seen called a hospital.
At one time some of these little tubs of sputum would have been harmful, bearing the contagious disease with the tongue-tying name tuberculosis (TB), which I’ve heard kills many human beings in this world, especially when they are poor.
The sputum has been processed to make safe to handle but the strong smell of TB – which we with our long noses smell though our human friends cannot – remains.
As
a Hero Rat my job could be to smell each hole and tell the humans,
through scratching, when I sense the deadly disease. I know that each
one of these pots has been checked by human heroes called lab
technicians with a strange silver thing called a microscope – but they
do not have our noses and sometimes they miss things.
Of course we are sometimes wrong too – that’s why two of us Hero Rats must identify the same sample which the humans have missed before it will be taken next door to the dark, cool, room where one of the two nice men in the white coats will look through the microscope to see the disease that we smelled.
The banana-eating Hannah Ford, whose job is to tell the world about us Hero Rats, is talking to a type of human called a journalist and I hear her say with pride, which I feel too: “A lab technician can view 20 to 30 samples a day with microscope, The World Health Organisation says that 40 is the maximum they can look at in day, our rats easily do that in under seven minutes – they’re just so much faster.
“In an average week our rats will check 600 to 700 samples and find 5 to 10 cases of tuberculosis which the hospitals missed. Before we started collecting these samples there was never any second-line screening done, the samples were simply thrown away.”
We walk inside, my long whiskers twitching excitedly at the change in atmosphere from the heat and packed dirt outside to the cool cleanness inside.
The journalists are shown how one day I may be trained, first with a smaller box with only three holes in it, and how when we correctly sniff out the tuberculosis we are rewarded with food. The training takes about six months but is slightly different for each of us.
Peter Luanda, who is 40 in human years, and one of the trainers for the 33 heroes who work in the TB lab, is holding Melitta – she is running around on his shoulders and Peter says she is “showing off for visitors” – I think Peter is right.
He describes how some of us rats will pass our test to become TB detectors more quickly than others. He also says: “Sometimes, just like you get a human that doesn’t like to work, so you can get a rat that doesn’t want to work, just lies down and starts sleeping. But most of the time they are passing their exams and that makes us happy.”
I am determined if I am chosen for TB work I will not be lazy, I will make Peter proud.
But, perhaps I will not be working in this lab; perhaps I will be working far away in a place called Mozambique where a new TB lab is to be built in the city of Maputo so that we can help Mozambicans as well as Tanzanians.
Or perhaps I will be in Mozambique sniffing the ground in fields and open countryside to find these things which humans put in the ground to kill other humans, even long after their quarrel has ended.
It is this work with landmines for which we Hero Rats are most famous. We rats are relatively newcomers and I hear that there are many humans who do this work, sometimes when there is a thing in the ground around these mines called oil, which must be very important indeed, big machines will be brought to the place by white humans who come from faraway places.
Then the mines will be exploded by the machines and the land quickly made safe. But when there is no oil there is no one to pay for these machines and the people must go on dying while farming for long years.
We Hero Rats aim to be most useful to those who are poorest and we are improving all the time. Recently we have doubled our speed.
We
are trained here at SUA for nine months with mines that can no longer
injure people but which still smell of their deadly substance. Our
trainers use a string to help us walk in straight lines carefully
sniffing the ground. When we find a mine we are rewarded with food.
Once when I visited the field here I heard a man speaking. His name is John Mosha and in human years he is 37.
He was telling some visitors of his favourite Hero Rat named Glory. Like all the SUA trainers here in Tanzania John had the chance once to go to Mozambique and see us in action with our new Mozambican handlers. Glory had graduated and started her work sometime earlier but John said he recognised her at once “because of her size and body morphology”.
“Most of my friends find my job funny and says it needs a lot of imagination,” said John.
“Locals in Mozambique also found it very funny. When they saw them performing this most of them were surprised but when they saw them bringing in land mines they were happy because they were releasing tension from their community.
“After removing mines the land can be used for agriculture, grazing, a lot of economic activities.”
John said he has been working at Apopo since the very early days, since 2002, when there were only 90 of us heroes as opposed to the 300 we have in our family now.
We work only early in the morning as it is too hot for us rats to work later in the day and John has now completed his part-time studies in business administration at SUA and will be looking for a new job, although I know from the tone in his voice he will miss us.
I remember him also saying to the visitors: “I think the SUA community should learn from Apopo. By that I mean they should do research that has a positive impact on communities working here. Apopo gives a good salary.
“They should be not just academic but there should be more practical research like this that has an impact on the community.”
Glory
is probably dead now, not from a landmine – we are too light to set
them off – simply from old age as we African giant pouched rats live
only 6-8 human years; they were both in Mozambique in 2003, but John
still remembers her.
But perhaps I will not be in either of these roles. Sometimes when I am put on top of the radio in the office, but the radio is not too loud, I hear about new jobs being devised for us Hero Rats.
Perhaps I may be a land mine detector in Thailand or Angola. Or perhaps I may be a pioneer rat in the illegal tobacco trade or in detecting salmonella which is the cause of a lot of thoroughbred horse deaths in a faraway place called the US.
Recently there was a Tsunami. I can’t imagine what this thing could be but I know from the way my human friends talk about it that it was horrible. Research has begun to find out whether we Hero Rats could be used to help in searching for and rescuing humans who have been caught in these horrible disasters.
All these jobs may one day be mine – but for now my job is to sniff, scratch and whiskery feel everything around me here at Sokoine University of Agriculture, Tanzania.
Please forgive a journalist her whimsy in channeling her inner rat (perhaps precipitated by the fact my school nickname for a time was ‘mouse’). All the speech in quotes and the facts and figures are reportage.
The terracotta red buildings with their timber-framed screen doors, the pink flowers, the palm trees, my big cousins, which my human friends call cows, are coming along the path, and to my left, in the distance, I can’t see them, because my eyesight is not great, but I can smell, my cousins the camel.
I’m glad we young rats get this time that the Apopo bosses call ‘socialisation’, before we begin our training and then our work.
I’m glad too that my friend Hannah is here and she is letting me lick her hand; this morning she was eating bananas.I’ve learned so many things already in my life. I was born under the ground in a comfortable dirt place which one day was dug up and then we were introduced to the light.
My siblings and I were then given our names. I am Aaron, and at four weeks we were moved from our mother, we were put in a new cage with a brown clay pot to sleep in, wood to play on and we began to be properly introduced to the world of humans.
This is a place of important learning but it took me a long time to learn its name was Sokoine University of Agriculture (SUA) because everyone calls it ‘Soowa’. I have smelled the fresh cut grass on what is called a football field, the grass cut by young men with machetes, I have seen the different types of vehicles that the students move about in, the tired, beaten looking ones called taxis and the small bright coloured ones which have no windows and doors called tuk-tuks – my favourite being a red one with words in thick pretty writing that said ‘campus shuttle’.
I am an African giant pouched rat, when I start work I will become a Hero Rat. I wonder what role will be chosen for me.
Inside, this building some of my older brothers and sisters are already working. There is a long glass box with many different holes. One by one the holes are opened, inside each hole is a small tub of a clear substance which sick humans cough up when they are in a place I have never seen called a hospital.
At one time some of these little tubs of sputum would have been harmful, bearing the contagious disease with the tongue-tying name tuberculosis (TB), which I’ve heard kills many human beings in this world, especially when they are poor.
The sputum has been processed to make safe to handle but the strong smell of TB – which we with our long noses smell though our human friends cannot – remains.
As
a Hero Rat my job could be to smell each hole and tell the humans,
through scratching, when I sense the deadly disease. I know that each
one of these pots has been checked by human heroes called lab
technicians with a strange silver thing called a microscope – but they
do not have our noses and sometimes they miss things.Of course we are sometimes wrong too – that’s why two of us Hero Rats must identify the same sample which the humans have missed before it will be taken next door to the dark, cool, room where one of the two nice men in the white coats will look through the microscope to see the disease that we smelled.
The banana-eating Hannah Ford, whose job is to tell the world about us Hero Rats, is talking to a type of human called a journalist and I hear her say with pride, which I feel too: “A lab technician can view 20 to 30 samples a day with microscope, The World Health Organisation says that 40 is the maximum they can look at in day, our rats easily do that in under seven minutes – they’re just so much faster.
“In an average week our rats will check 600 to 700 samples and find 5 to 10 cases of tuberculosis which the hospitals missed. Before we started collecting these samples there was never any second-line screening done, the samples were simply thrown away.”
We walk inside, my long whiskers twitching excitedly at the change in atmosphere from the heat and packed dirt outside to the cool cleanness inside.
The journalists are shown how one day I may be trained, first with a smaller box with only three holes in it, and how when we correctly sniff out the tuberculosis we are rewarded with food. The training takes about six months but is slightly different for each of us.
Peter Luanda, who is 40 in human years, and one of the trainers for the 33 heroes who work in the TB lab, is holding Melitta – she is running around on his shoulders and Peter says she is “showing off for visitors” – I think Peter is right.
He describes how some of us rats will pass our test to become TB detectors more quickly than others. He also says: “Sometimes, just like you get a human that doesn’t like to work, so you can get a rat that doesn’t want to work, just lies down and starts sleeping. But most of the time they are passing their exams and that makes us happy.”
I am determined if I am chosen for TB work I will not be lazy, I will make Peter proud.
But, perhaps I will not be working in this lab; perhaps I will be working far away in a place called Mozambique where a new TB lab is to be built in the city of Maputo so that we can help Mozambicans as well as Tanzanians.
Or perhaps I will be in Mozambique sniffing the ground in fields and open countryside to find these things which humans put in the ground to kill other humans, even long after their quarrel has ended.
It is this work with landmines for which we Hero Rats are most famous. We rats are relatively newcomers and I hear that there are many humans who do this work, sometimes when there is a thing in the ground around these mines called oil, which must be very important indeed, big machines will be brought to the place by white humans who come from faraway places.
Then the mines will be exploded by the machines and the land quickly made safe. But when there is no oil there is no one to pay for these machines and the people must go on dying while farming for long years.
We Hero Rats aim to be most useful to those who are poorest and we are improving all the time. Recently we have doubled our speed.
We
are trained here at SUA for nine months with mines that can no longer
injure people but which still smell of their deadly substance. Our
trainers use a string to help us walk in straight lines carefully
sniffing the ground. When we find a mine we are rewarded with food.Once when I visited the field here I heard a man speaking. His name is John Mosha and in human years he is 37.
He was telling some visitors of his favourite Hero Rat named Glory. Like all the SUA trainers here in Tanzania John had the chance once to go to Mozambique and see us in action with our new Mozambican handlers. Glory had graduated and started her work sometime earlier but John said he recognised her at once “because of her size and body morphology”.
“Most of my friends find my job funny and says it needs a lot of imagination,” said John.
“Locals in Mozambique also found it very funny. When they saw them performing this most of them were surprised but when they saw them bringing in land mines they were happy because they were releasing tension from their community.
“After removing mines the land can be used for agriculture, grazing, a lot of economic activities.”
John said he has been working at Apopo since the very early days, since 2002, when there were only 90 of us heroes as opposed to the 300 we have in our family now.
We work only early in the morning as it is too hot for us rats to work later in the day and John has now completed his part-time studies in business administration at SUA and will be looking for a new job, although I know from the tone in his voice he will miss us.
I remember him also saying to the visitors: “I think the SUA community should learn from Apopo. By that I mean they should do research that has a positive impact on communities working here. Apopo gives a good salary.
“They should be not just academic but there should be more practical research like this that has an impact on the community.”
Glory
is probably dead now, not from a landmine – we are too light to set
them off – simply from old age as we African giant pouched rats live
only 6-8 human years; they were both in Mozambique in 2003, but John
still remembers her.But perhaps I will not be in either of these roles. Sometimes when I am put on top of the radio in the office, but the radio is not too loud, I hear about new jobs being devised for us Hero Rats.
Perhaps I may be a land mine detector in Thailand or Angola. Or perhaps I may be a pioneer rat in the illegal tobacco trade or in detecting salmonella which is the cause of a lot of thoroughbred horse deaths in a faraway place called the US.
Recently there was a Tsunami. I can’t imagine what this thing could be but I know from the way my human friends talk about it that it was horrible. Research has begun to find out whether we Hero Rats could be used to help in searching for and rescuing humans who have been caught in these horrible disasters.
All these jobs may one day be mine – but for now my job is to sniff, scratch and whiskery feel everything around me here at Sokoine University of Agriculture, Tanzania.
Please forgive a journalist her whimsy in channeling her inner rat (perhaps precipitated by the fact my school nickname for a time was ‘mouse’). All the speech in quotes and the facts and figures are reportage.
Apopo, founded
in 2000, is a Belgian NGO headquartered in Tanzania which works on
projects in Tanzania, Mozambique and Thailand. It has a policy of
training and employing local people with 190 of its 200 staff coming
from these developing countries.
Tuberculosis
- 1.7million people die from TB each year.
- 1 person left untreated is likely to spread the disease to 10 to 15 others.
- Apopo works with 10 hospitals in Tanzania and, on average, has increased the detection rate by more than 40 percent.
- In 2010, 26,665 sputum samples were examined by rats and 716 TB positive patients were detected only through Apopo.
- Apopo will be replicating its ‘second-line’ screening lab in Maputo, Mozambique.
- It is investigating using rats in the first instance instead of as second-line screening.
Landmines
- The UN estimates landmines kill up to 20,000 people per year and make agriculture a deadly pursuit for millions more.
- 2.1 million sq metres of land was cleared in Mozambique by the end of 2010, with 796,168 sq metres in 2010 alone.
- New techniques developed in 2010 meant that Apopo was able to double its speed. As a result it aims to have cleared another 1.5-2 million sq metres of land by the end of 2011.
- In 2010 36 Hero Rats, working with 14 locally trained handlers, found 861 landmines; 373 items of unexploded ordnance; 1 cluster bomb and 6,216 small arms and ammunitions.
- The cost per square metre of clearing landmines can vary greatly per place and per organisation with reported costs ranging from 50 US cents to $5 (US). In Bosnia and Hertzegovna, in 2003, Landmine Monitor says the average for Non Governmental Organisations (NGOs) was $2 (US). Apopo reports a cost of $1.50 (US) per square metre.
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Of mice and mines: trained rats search for explosives, tuberculosis
http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/09/of-mice-and-mines-trained-rats-search-for-explosives-tuberculosis/
Smell a rat? Or vice versa? A Belgian engineer has successfully trained rats …
Rat at work
15-20,000 people are killed by landmines each year. Detecting those
mines—without setting them off—is a dilemma that faces many post-conflict
regions of the world. But Bart Weetjens may have found a six-pound solution
to the problem: the African giant pouched rat. Working for APOPO, a Belgian organization founded to
explore the idea, Weetjens has successfully trained rats to locate land
mines by smell. The animals have also been trained to identify tuberculosis
from samples, a development that may prove equally promising.
How did he come up with the idea of using rats for these detection problems? In a Skype interview from his office in Tanzania, Weetjens confessed that he's always been interested in helping Africa but was initially stalled for solutions. "I wanted to do something in the real world, something appropriate to the environment," he told Ars.
In the early 1990's, when it became a cause célèbre for Princess Diana and others, Weetjens began looking into landmines. In travels to Mozambique and Angola, he watched as trained dogs searched for buried explosives. But dogs are expensive (in the neighborhood of $25,000), and many were lost to disease or the mines they were meant to detect. There had to be a better way.
The breakthrough came when Weetjens saw an article in which gerbils had been trained as a "black box" vapor detector. He knew that those rodents couldn't be his choice: "way too nervous… but rats could do the job." After searching for grant money for more than two years, he was able to begin breeding tame pouched rats (a hardy, adaptable African species) for training. Beginning with a stock of thirty animals, APOPO has now trained more than 120 free-running "Hero Rats," twenty-three of which are certified by an international agency as equal to dogs in effectiveness.
The similarities don't actually end at the certification. Like dogs, some rats can be easier to train than others. On average, the rats take 10-12 months to be fully trained for mine-sniffing, Weetjens said, a process that's complicated by the distracting stimulus of the outside environment. The rats are trained using a clicker and a banana reward (again, much like dogs, except for the fruit), and they've had a graduation rate of about one out of every four "students."
Successfully trained rats indicated the location of mines by pointing their noses directly at the ground for more than five seconds. "That's a very long time for a rat," noted Weetjens, although he added that some also develop circling or scratching behavior as an indicator. The rodents wear harnesses and run along strings laid out across the suspected area, ensuring that they cover the entire grid. And at six pounds, they're too light to set off the explosives by accident.
A mine-detecting rat working its grid
Weetjens hopes that they can be used as a portable screening tool,
one that can be located near slums and other at-risk areas. The disease
kills about 1.6 million people per year, according to the World Health
Organization. And since many tuberculosis cases in Africa accompany
HIV, a fast screening technique is a perfect opportunity to educate
patients about the disease. What's the future for these not-so-stupid pet tricks? Weetjens isn't ruling out new directions, including commercial applications—sustainable funding for testing with rats (as opposed to testing on rats) isn't easy to find. But his ultimate aim remains humanitarian: Recent research into diagnosing cancer with animals is one possibility, as are "rescue rats"—the rodents are small and light enough to slip into collapsed structures in search of trapped occupants. And for right now, Weetjens seems pretty happy with the progress of his own personal rat race.
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利用老鼠找地雷 一天抵人類兩周 【2013/4/6 21:29】
利用探測鼠找地雷，工作一天可抵人類兩周。（圖片擷取自網路）
訓練課程之一，老鼠必須順著棍子的路徑移動。（圖片擷取自網路）
坦尚尼亞的探測鼠，投入至今已發現近兩千枚地雷、超過一萬兩千顆手榴彈和子彈。（圖片擷取自網路）
