This was the first article I ever read on it some time ago. It would seem our many animal friends are able to help us in many ways never seen as a possibility in the past.
Thw World Health Organization, the World Bank and the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda MD are all supporting the study.
Sorry didn't meean to take so much space.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn4488-giant-rats-to-sniff-out-tuberculosis.html
Link to another set of pix.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2007/12/18/eamine118.xml
There are many wonderful stories.
http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/tanzania605/video_index.html
"Rats of one species in Africa are being trained to detect tuberculosis (TB) by sniffing the saliva of suspected TB sufferers. The rats have already been successfully used to detect landmines by their odour. Preliminary tests suggest the rats could test as many as 150 saliva samples for TB in just 30 minutes. By contrast, human technicians using a microscope can test only 20 samples a day.
It is vital to detect TB as early as possible. TB is curable, with early detection, good healthcare facilities and access to drugs.
The rat study, which will begin in July, 2004, will test the olfactory abilities of about 30 rats. The researchers will compare the rats adeptness with the 95 per cent accuracy of smear microscopy.
Preliminary results look positive. The researchers used bananas and peanuts to reward rats when they stopped beside a target smell. In this way, they sensitised five rats to the smell of TB bacteria in saliva and another five to the smell of TB bacteria grown in test tubes.
The rats were then tested using 10,000 saliva samples and they identified about 77 per cent of infected saliva samples. Researchers hope that using three or four trained rats on each sample will increase the accuracy.
The rats scored better nearly 92 per cent with cultured bacteria. The number of samples where rats stopped at uninfected samples, was less than 2 per cent for both cultures and saliva.
The idea came through a clue in the Dutch language. The Dutch word for TB is tering, which translates roughly as the process of developing the smell for tar. The researchers also had read reports of traditional Chinese healers diagnosing the disease by smelling the patients saliva as it evaporated over a flame.
Researchers are now studying ways dogs our four-legged friends could help diagnose diseases.
Dr Lawrence Myers and his team are teaching them to sniff out suspicious odours. One day, these dogs could be sniffing out odours from skin cancer.
A dogs sense of smell is actually up to 100,000-times more sensitive than a humans. Doctor Myers envisions a future where dogs will work side by side with doctors.
People simply can go to a skin specialists office, and the dog can check them over, instead of waiting for them to notice an abnormally shaped or coloured mole.
Dr Barbara Sommerville, of the Cambridge University in the UK is planning to use dogs to detect prostate cancer. She hopes to train dogs to react to cancer cells in urine samples. This would revolutionise the screening process for detecting prostate cancer early.
Dr Sommerville has no doubt that if there were a consistent change in odour the dogs will be able to detect it.
As of today, detecting prostate cancer is an inexact science. The currently used methods provide a lot of false positives and some false negatives. However, dog trainers believe that they could train dogs to sniff out prostate cancer in a period of six months.
Dogs have also been used to assist people suffering from epilepsy. The dog tells the owner that they are about to have an attack.
It makes sense to investigate if the dog can help the diagnosis in any disease where chemical clues are coming from the body.
The aim is to put together the dog with current conventional diagnosis and simply get much better results faster and cheaper.
Dog trainers train dogs to help with a range of conditions. There are dogs that alert the owner to blood sugar, high blood pressure, migraine headaches, heart attacks and the like.
However, dogs arent the only ones with a nose for medicine. A diabetic woman says that her cat known when her blood sugar is low. The cat keeps nudging the woman until she checks it and sure enough she finds it to be low.
The woman lives alone. If her blood sugar falls when shes asleep or if it drops too low, too fast, and shes already disoriented, the cats watchful eyes would save her life.
The cat would deliberately come over and touched her face or actually nipped at her leg until the woman got out of bed and took appropriate medicine.
A study in the British Medical Journal adds weight to this phenomenon, and a survey shows that nearly 70 per cent of dogs who sensed their owners low blood sugar reacted to it."
And more recently
http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/COUNTRIES/AFRICAEXT/TANZANIAEXTN/0,,contentMDK:21462478~menuPK:287354~pagePK:2865066~piPK:2865079~theSitePK:258799,00.htm
Hope these links work, but just one picture gives you an idea of their size. Little sweeties.
