https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/african-giant-pouched-hero-rats-stop-tb-landmines
Until recently, Carolina worked Monday through Friday, with weekends off.
At her retirement this past November, colleagues lined up to applaud her and celebrate over cake. In her seven-year career, she had detected more than 3,000 cases of tuberculosis that health clinics had missed and, as a result, likely spared more than 30,000 other people from infection.
But she's not exactly your typical employee. Carolina is an African giant pouched rat who can screen 100 sputum (i.e phlegm) samples for tuberculosis in 20 minutes—much faster than a human, who takes four days to process the same amount of information with a microscope. And she’s part of a cohort of 40 rats belonging to nonprofit APOPO who are helping to combat the tuberculosis epidemic in Tanzania and Ethiopia.
“Everybody’s first impression is that the rats are our enemies,” Tefera Agizew, a physician and APOPO’s head of tuberculosis, says of the animals’ reputation in Africa and beyond. “Once they see how they function, they fall in love with them.”
African giant pouched rats are not your typical New York City–style rodent. They’re calm, easier to train than some dogs, and able to work up to seven or eight years (they live eight to 10 years in captivity). Their body alone is generally longer than a 13-inch MacBook Air—and their tail is equally as long, if not longer. (A New York City rat is only about 16 inches, nose to tail.) A giant pouched rat’s sense of smell is so strong that they could conceivably detect half a drop of chlorine in a space the size of 20 Olympic-sized swimming pools, says APOPO’s head of training Cindy Fast, a behavioral neuroscientist who coaches the rodents.
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