Rats have long been guilty of spreading disease. But now they’ve gone into the diagnosis side. Because rats can be trained to ____1____ tuberculosis—and to do it better than conventional techniques. The finding is in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.
TB is the number-one ____2____ 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 ____3____ equipment and trained personnel. And it’s not all that accurate.
That’s where 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 ____4____ microscopes found about 13 percent of the patients to be TB-positive. The rats identified an additional 620 cases, ____5____ the detection rate by 44 percent.
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.
【视听版科学小组荣誉出品】
spot infectious disease killer sophisticated fancy boosting
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。 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。 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%。 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。