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rat detects TB
#1
Carolina the giant rat hero after saving many lives

archived link to Nat Geo article.
“Art is how we decorate space.
Music is how we decorate time.”
Jean-Michel Basquiat
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#2
Until recently, Carolina worked Monday through Friday, with weekends off.

At her retirement this past November, colleagues lined up to applaud her and celebrate over cake. In her seven-year career, she had detected more than 3,000 cases of tuberculosis that health clinics had missed and, as a result, likely spared more than 30,000 other people from infection.

But she's not exactly your typical employee. Carolina is an African giant pouched rat who can screen 100 sputum (i.e phlegm) samples for tuberculosis in 20 minutes—much faster than a human, who takes four days to process the same amount of information with a microscope. And she’s part of a cohort of 40 rats belonging to nonprofit APOPO who are helping to combat the tuberculosis epidemic in Tanzania and Ethiopia.


that's crazy!
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#3
which is why you hardly ever see rats coughing up blood on the NYC subway.
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#4
Steve G. wrote:
which is why you hardly ever see rats coughing up blood on the NYC subway.

:boink:
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#5
APOPO also trains these giant rats to detect mines. They have a fairly long lifespan (for a rat) and are very smart.
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