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Rats Training to Find Land Mines and Diagnose Diseases

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Rats Training to Find Land Mines and Diagnose Diseases

Rats Training to Find Land Mines and Diagnose Diseases

Bart Weetjens is a Dutch industrial engineer by training and trade.   In 1995 he heeded Princess Diana’s call for the eradication of land mines. Land mines are found in many parts of the world.  Left behind as deadly reminders of wars of past decades – especially Africa and parts of Asia.

How can mines be detected and neutralized in a low cost and a manner safe to humans?  Engineer Weetjens uses trained “Hero Rats.”

Rats have been used in science experiments for many years.  They have extremely well developed senses of smell.  They are easy to train using food rewards for performing simple tasks.

Train the rat – using his sense of small – to scratch the ground when he smells a land mine and come back to his “handler” for a food reward.  A trained “Hero Rat” gets a license for successfully completing training and the testing process.

The training program can be completed for 1/5 of the cost for training a dog to detect land mines.  And the rats are as effective as dogs in finding land mines.

Even more amazing is the rat’s ability to conduct medical tests using its sense of smell.

In a tuberculosis testing facility in Tanzania, a trained human medical microscopist can process 40 samples per day with a reliability of 40 to 60 percent.  A trained medical rat can process 40 samples in 7 minutes.

Mr. Weetjens relates that using a team of 25 rats when checking the samples is nearly 90 percent accurate. And they can test 1680 samples a day.

Mr. Weetjens team has started working a prototype mini-camera back pack for trained rats to conduct search and rescue missions in disaster situations such as earthquakes.

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