Purpose driven Rats.

In 1997, a group known as the APOPO saw potentials in  rodents with a sense of smell as keen as a dog’s but dismissed as pesty vermin — or a potential meal.
Since then rats from Tanzania have been used in detecting landmines, but these African giant pouched rats have now been taken to further their live saving worth by speeding up tuberculosis detection.
It’s all in the nose, says the Belgian non-governmental organisation APOPO whose NGO has been based in Morogoro in Tanzania’s eastern highlands since 2000 
It is recorded that about 83,000 landmines have been neutralised in Africa and Asia courtesy of the rodents.
The biggest obstacle as stated by the director of APOPO has been the negative perception that people have of the rat.
Anti-Personnel Landmines Detection Product Development - recently branched out in 2007 to use rats for TB detection by exposing sputum from potential patients to the rats. Africa accounts for most of the people who die of TB every year and untreated carriers can infect dozens of others, making speedy detection essential.
Today, more than 29 hospitals in Dar es Salaam and Morogoro send the Morogoro lab sputum samples. Another dozen clinics in the Mozambique capital Maputo send samples to an APOPO center opened in that country in 2013.
The NGO says it has detected 10,000 missed TB cases, identified by workers like Oprah and Violet, whiskers bristling as they move along a row of test tubes.
“The big advantage is how quick the rats are. They can go through 100 samples in about 20 minutes, and this is what a lab technician will take four days to do,” said Cox.
During TB detection, rats are presented with a mix of negative and positive samples, the latter decontaminated for safety “but the smell remains”, said training director Haruni Ramadhan.
When a rat identifies a “true” positive, it is rewarded with a banana-peanut butter mixture. “We can only reward the rat if we are certain it is right,” Ramadhan said.
The negatives are not necessarily suspicious but become “suspect”, and subjected to further testing, if the rat reacts.
“Thanks to the rats, we have increased (TB case) detection rates by 40 percent” in the participating clinics, said Cox — citing the same figure given by Dr. Magesa.
APOPO currently employs 222 rats — 108 for demining and 42 TB detectors.
The World Health Organization has not, so far, endorsed this TB testing but APOPO, funded mainly by donations, won’t stop there. Buoyed by its success, future ideas include trying out rats in detecting cancer and neurodegenerative diseases.