--Must See--

Bioinformatics Summer Internship 2024 With Hands-On-Training + Project / Dissertation - 30 Days, 3 Months & 6 Months Duration

Rats Used to Sniff Out TB for Better Detection in Children

Tuberculosis (TB) is a deadly disease, which killed 1.3 million people worldwide in 2016, of whom 130,000 were children. Sub Saharan Africa and South East Asia are among the regions with the highest burden of TB. A large proportion of TB patients remain undetected in most high-burden areas due to the poor sensitivity of smear microscopy widely used in these areas.

In many low-income countries, the diagnosis of pediatric TB is solely based on clinical evidence and smear microscopy. Pediatric TB is difficult to diagnose due to paucibacillary that complicates mycobacteriological confirmation by smear microscopy and culture which yields <15% and between 30 and 40% sensitivities, respectively.

In addition, for children it is challenging to produce a sufficient volume of good-quality sputum needed for smear microscopy. As a result, many children with TB are not bacteriologically confirmed or not even diagnosed, which has major implications for their treatment success rate.

Now, according to a new research by a team at the Sokoine University of Agriculture in Tanzania, trained rats could represent the answer to the need for more effective ways of diagnosing tuberculosis (TB) in children.

The team, led

by Dr. Georgies Mgode, employed African giant pouched rats (Cricetomys ansorgei) to sniff out sputum samples obtained from 982 children under the age of five. All of those samples had already been tested using the standard smear technique at clinics in the Tanzanian capital of Dar es Salaam.

Those tests indicated that 34 of the children had TB. The rats, however, discovered an additional 23 cases of the disease, which were confirmed when the samples were analyzed using a more advanced light emitting diode fluorescence microscope.

Similarly, when existing tests caught 94 cases of TB in kids ages 6 to 10, the rats caught an additional 35 cases. In adolescents, the existing test caught 775 cases, and the rats added 177. In adults, the existing tests caught 7,448 cases, and the rats added 2,510 confirmed TB cases.

In other words, the rats became less useful as the patients got older, but in every age group, the rodents significantly improved upon existing tests.

The researchers also advocate investigating whether rats can be trained to detect TB in urine or other samples, such as gastic lavage or nasopharyngeal aspiration. “Further determination of accuracy of rats involving other sample types is still needed…Urine could provide noninvasive sampling, whereas gastric and nasopharyngeal aspiration are widely used when children cannot produce sputum samples.”

In search of the perfect burger. Serial eater. In her spare time, practises her "Vader Voice". Passionate about dance. Real Weird.