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Rats have long been guilty of spreading disease. But now they’ve gone into the diagnosis side. Because rats can be trained to spot tuberculosis—and to do it better than conventional techniques. The finding is in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.
老鼠一直因为传播疾病而臭名昭著。但它们也能为诊断疾病做贡献了,因为老鼠经过训练可以测出肺结核,而且比传统技术做得更好。这项研究发表在美国《热带医学与卫生学》杂志上。

TB is the number-one infectious disease killer in the world. Early detection saves lives. But the most common way to diagnose TB, visually checking sputum samples for the microbe that causes the disease, requires sophisticated equipment and trained personnel. And it’s not all that accurate.
肺结核是全球头号传染病杀手,发现得早能救你一命。观看检测唾液样本中的病菌是最常用的肺结核诊断方法,但这需要精密的仪器和受过训练的人员才能进行。这种方式并不精确。

That’s why the rats come in. The critters are easy to train and can smell chemicals present with a TB infection. So scientists sent more than 20,000 sputum samples from 10,000 patients in Tanzania to be analyzed microscopically. They then presented the same samples to the rats. The results: the fancy microscopes found about 13 percent of the patients to be TB-positive. The rats identified an additional 620 cases, boosting the detection rate by 44 percent.
这就是老鼠参与检测的原因了。这小家伙容易训练,而且可以嗅出带有肺结核 感染的化学物质。因此,科学家们寄出2万份来自1万名坦桑尼亚患者的唾液样本,并用显微镜来分析。他们又为老鼠提供了相同的样本。结果就是:价格高昂的显 微镜检测到约13%呈肺结核阳性的患者,老鼠则多辨认出了620份样本,检测率提高了44%。

That may not sound like much, but remember a person with TB can infect another dozen or so people over the course of a year. So that’s more than 7000 people that could be saved by a rat.
这数字似乎没什么了不起。但请记住:一名肺结核患者在一年中可以感染十几个人。所以老鼠可以挽救7000多条人命哟。

—Karen Hopkin

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