How trained rats in Tanzania use their amazing noses to help doctors save lives
In Tanzania, a team of motorcycle couriers travels every day to pick up medical samples from clinics. These samples come from people who might have tuberculosis (TB), a serious lung disease.
The samples are brought to a lab in Dar Es Salaam. There, the samples are made safe so they can be tested.
But here’s the coolest part: the lab workers who help the most aren’t doctors or scientists. They’re rats.
Not regular rats—these are African giant pouched rats, and they are trained to sniff out TB using their powerful sense of smell.
Occasional sips of a banana-and-avocado smoothie are all the motivation they need.
Why rats are so good at this
Rats have an incredible sense of smell—much better than humans. When someone has TB, their body gives off tiny chemical signals in their sputum (mucus from the lungs).
These chemicals float in the air, and the rats can smell the pattern.
This helps because looking for TB under a microscope can be slow and difficult. But rats can check a huge number of samples quickly.
A rat can sniff about 100 samples in only 20 minutes.
That’s super fast compared to the old way, which can take days.
Rats don’t need to know the science—they just need training
Scientists have found that TB doesn’t smell like just one chemical. It’s more like a “mix” of smells.
The rats don’t react to any single chemical. But when at least six TB-related chemicals are mixed, the rats recognize it.
And when they get it right, they earn a smoothie reward.
What makes these rats special
These rats are good at doing the same job repeatedly. That’s important because most samples do NOT have TB, and the rats still have to stay focused.
Also, rats are smaller and cheaper to care for than dogs, so labs can use several rats to check the same sample. That makes the results more accurate.
The big impact
Between 2013 and 2023, these rats helped test almost one million samples. They found more than 30,000 TB cases that clinics had missed.
That means thousands of people got treatment sooner—and it helped stop TB from spreading to others.
I think this is one of the coolest examples of science simply helping people. These rats aren’t scary or gross—they’re trained helpers with superhero noses. If a smoothie reward helps them find a deadly disease faster, then I say: let the rats drink smoothies forever.
Source:
- https://youtu.be/2N8QMVYOlAo?si=iyfc4CTD2_mSyaS8
- https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/140816-rats-tuberculosis-smell-disease-health-animals-world
- https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01751-9
- https://chatgpt.com/
- https://aistudio.google.com/
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