Ratting out Tuberculosis
Stanford EDU defines Social innovation as “a novel solution to a social problem that is more effective, efficient, sustainable, or just than current solutions. The value created accrues primary to society rather than to private individuals” (1). For this situation, the issue is tuberculosis, and the social innovation is something called HeroRATS. According to National Geographic, an organization known as APOPO has begun training rodents to identify strains of tuberculosis in samples kept in a lab. They said that “Training rodents to detect TB is a relatively new endeavor for APOPO, the Belgian nonprofit organization that’s best known for using rats to find land mines. APOPO began using TB rats in Tanzania in 2008 and in Mozambique in 2013”. (2). A TB specialist with the organization commented that “we know that we need a new approach in the diagnosis of TB, so this could be one of the approaches”. National Geographic also includes that rats have proven themselves to be a promising solution thus far; having identified 1,700 of roughly 12,500 infected and non-infected samples in the past 16 months. Lab technicians can make mistakes, which is why labs all over the world have been favoring this new technique. The goal of this technique is to make tuberculosis detection more accurate, therefore stopping more cases and eventually preventing the spread of the disease. According to the National Library of Medicine, “Microscopists fail to detect the bacteria in many samples that actually contain it, especially when few bacteria are present. Hence, some training samples deemed negative are actually TB positive. This probably increases the level of what appears to be false positives, because these rats may be identifying bacteria that microscopists missed in some training samples” (3). The accuracy of these TB detecting HeroRATS is proving to be insanely accurate, therefore taking us one step closer to putting an end to TB.
References
"Defining Social Innovation." Stanford Graduate School of Business. Stanford Graduate School, n.d. Web. 25 Apr. 2017.
"Giant Rats Trained to Sniff Out Tuberculosis in Africa." National Geographic. National Geographic Society, 14 Apr. 2017. Web. 25 Apr. 2017.
Poling, Alan, Bart Weetjens, Christophe Cox, Negussie Beyene, Amy Durgin, and Amanda Mahoney. "Tuberculosis Detection by Giant African Pouched Rats." The Behavior Analyst. The Association for Behavior Analysis, Inc., 2011. Web. 25 Apr. 2017.
