As vaccination efforts intensify worldwide, discovering who carries the coronavirus and who is healthy remains a major obstacle. Now, researchers say that rats may be able to help in detecting the virus.
Researchers at the University of Glasgow in Scotland have stated that it is possible to train giant rats to detect the coronavirus, using them as part of the fight against the pandemic, similar to a plan that involved training dogs to sniff out the virus among travelers at airports. This suggestion comes from scientists who have trained giant rats to detect a deadly virus that affects goat and cattle herds in the poorest countries, namely brucellosis, a highly contagious animal disease that causes flu-like symptoms in humans. Patients infected with the disease may also suffer from bone, joint, and heart issues, and in some cases, the disease can be fatal.
**Rats and Their Role in Disease Detection**
It is noted that treating brucellosis is extremely costly, which is why researchers from Scotland and Tanzania are working on a project to employ trained rats to tackle this problem. African giant rats, which can grow up to three feet long, have previously been successfully trained to sniff out landmines and tuberculosis. In Tanzania, Mozambique, and Ethiopia, trained rats have helped increase the detection rate of tuberculosis in clinics by about 40%, and they are currently being specifically trained to assist in combating brucellosis.
**Animals Play a Significant Role in Fighting Diseases**
Scientists are now exploring whether this research could have broader benefits in understanding how diseases like the coronavirus transfer from animals to humans. Professor Dan Haydon, director of the Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health, and Comparative Medicine at the University of Glasgow, stated, "It is entirely possible to train these rats to detect the novel coronavirus, especially with evidence that dogs can do so with high accuracy."
Regarding animals and the coronavirus pandemic, some trainers claim that dogs can detect the virus with near-perfect accuracy, with one such program implemented in France, where dogs were trained to identify the scent and presence of the virus in human sweat, particularly in the armpit area. These methods have provided airports with faster alternatives to rapid testing kits, which can be expensive for detecting the virus among travelers.
Professor Haydon added, "It is estimated that six out of ten known infectious diseases in humans originate from animals. Three-quarters of new or emerging infectious diseases in humans have animal origins, of which the novel coronavirus is a particularly lethal example."
