My Nonprofit Reviews

Apopo HeroRATS is amazing, truly amazing. Rats saving human lives in their daily work. No, not as victims in a lab. But rats going to work five days a week as land mine detectors and TB diagnosticians. Rats have an unbelievable sense of smell. They can smell land mines and other weaponry beneath the earth. They are light enough to set out with tiny harnesses, attached to wire runs in parallel, and walk the ground where there may be mines. A rat who finds a mine turns a circle and gets a bit of banana; and a human life is potentially saved. The little TB lab rats are given sterilized samples of human saliva which lab testing by humans and machines has accepted as healthy. The rats find the false negatives thus saving the life of the patient and the dozen or so people even just that one patient could have infected.

The ideas are incredible and the agency that has made them work, a dream. Thank you Apopo and the truly heroic rats!