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.
【視聽版科學(xué)小組榮譽(yù)出品】
spot infectious disease killer sophisticated fancy boosting
老鼠一直因?yàn)閭鞑ゼ膊《裘阎?。但它們也能為診斷疾病做貢獻(xiàn)了，因?yàn)槔鲜蠼?jīng)過訓(xùn)練可以測(cè)出肺結(jié)核，而且比傳統(tǒng)技術(shù)做得更好。這項(xiàng)研究發(fā)表在美國《熱帶醫(yī)學(xué)與衛(wèi)生學(xué)》雜志上。 肺結(jié)核是全球頭號(hào)傳染病殺手，發(fā)現(xiàn)得早能救你一命。觀看檢測(cè)唾液樣本中的病菌是最常用的肺結(jié)核診斷方法，但這需要精密的儀器和受過訓(xùn)練的人員才能進(jìn)行。這種方式并不精確。 這就是老鼠參與檢測(cè)的原因了。這小家伙容易訓(xùn)練，而且可以嗅出帶有肺結(jié)核感染的化學(xué)物質(zhì)。因此，科學(xué)家們寄出2萬份來自1萬名坦桑尼亞患者的唾液樣本，并用顯微鏡來分析。他們又為老鼠提供了相同的樣本。結(jié)果就是：價(jià)格高昂的顯微鏡檢測(cè)到約13%呈肺結(jié)核陽性的患者，老鼠則多辨認(rèn)出了620份樣本，檢測(cè)率提高了44%。 這數(shù)字似乎沒什么了不起。但請(qǐng)記住：一名肺結(jié)核患者在一年中可以感染十幾個(gè)人。所以老鼠可以挽救7000多條人命喲。