Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK, Jan 18, 2011 (IPS) - While floods and droughts are often highlighted in the media for devastating the world’s rice production, a lesser-known culprit has been able to scurry away without being fingered for causing damage - rats.
The rodents reportedly devour "millions of tons of rice each year" in pre- harvest losses across Asia.
"Rats are the number one pre-harvest pests of rice in Indonesia and the third most important pest in Vietnam rice fields," Grant Singleton, a rodent expert at the Manila-based International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), told IPS.
With an eye toward saving more rice for the hungry in the region, international researchers are training farmers in Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam to combat this regular destroyer of the grain. Agriculture experts are viewing the eco-friendly rodent management message now taking root in the smallholder paddy fields in Southeast Asia as an efficient and safe alternative to the previously common use of toxic chemicals, such as rodenticides.
"This is the first time that ecologically-based rodent management has been promoted since the introduction of chemicals to kill rodents in the 1950s," said Singleton. "We now have a good understanding of when, where and how to conduct control of the main rodent species in two of the region’s largest rice producers.
Close to 200,000 rice farmers in Indonesia and Vietnam are part of an on- going campaign to arm farmers with environmentally friendly methods to save their crop from the rodents.
According to IRRI, pre-harvest losses of Asia’s staple have ranged from five percent of the grain in Malaysia to as much as 17 percent in Indonesia. A loss of six percent in Asia "amounts to enough rice to feed 225 million people - roughly the population of Indonesia - for 12 months," it adds.
The drive to combat the rodents comes in the wake of a challenge faced by agriculture research centres in the region to produce sufficient grain to feed the nearly 570 million people who are undernourished in the Asia-Pacific region.
Asia accounts for 90 percent of the rice produced globally, which topped 679.9 million tonnes for the year in un-milled paddy, according to recent U.N. figures.
The region’s major rice producers - home to the 250 million rice farms across the continent - are China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines and Burma (or Myanmar).
The new IRRI-led effort, places greater emphasis on community cooperation and management - including the simple message that farmers plant their crops within two weeks of each other - is already winning praise among farmers who have embraced this green solution.
"I now know how to manage rats better, working with my community so there are fewer in our fields and the rat damage is less," says Esmeraldo Joson Jr, a Filipino farmer, following his shift away from rodenticides, in an IRRI media release.
This is not the only attempt in the region to stop rats from depriving people from their staple diet.
The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has been helping farming communities in East Timor and Cambodia to save their harvested rice by storing it in small metal silos, considered more reliable and rat-proof than the traditional baskets and clay pots farmers have used for ages.
"These are small weapons against post-harvest losses," says Rosa Rolle, senior agro-industry and post harvest officer at the FAO’s Asia-Pacific regional office in Bangkok. "They offer long term solutions and are not costly to protect rice against rats and mice."
The twin efforts to combat the trail of grain losses caused by rats have gathered momentum following the global food crisis in 2008, when prices of grain rose to alarming levels and triggered concerns about millions affected by loss of staple meals.
"After the 2008 food crisis, saving rice from post-harvest losses are getting increased attention from all the stakeholders," says Subash Dasgupta, senior plant production officer at the FAO’s regional office.
Another spark to target rodents stemmed from the fears of famine that have spread through parts of northeast India, Bangladesh, Burma and Laos since the end of 2006, when a plague of rats ravaged rice in the fields and grains that had been stored.
"The rats were terrible. There was nothing the farmers could do," says Cheery Zahau, a human rights activist from Burma’s Chin ethnic minority who faced the brunt of the devastation from late 2006 through 2008.
Chin families normally eat two meals a day, but during the explosion of the rat population, they were reduced to eating only one meal, she told IPS. "The health consequences of that food crisis were very serious."
The explosion of the rat population was predicted though, coming once in nearly 50 years, when a local bamboo species starts flowering. The rats are drawn to its fruit and then multiply rapidly due to a hormonal change after eating the protein-rich fruits.
The rats ravaged all the grain in their path, prompting some farmers in the mountainous Chin State close to India and Bangladesh to stop growing rice in 2008. "They felt it was futile," says Cheery. "They were defeated by the rats."
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=54158
Showing posts with label rats. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rats. Show all posts
Tuesday, 18 January 2011
Monday, 3 January 2011
TUBERCULOSIS: Giant Rats Detect Tuberculosis
Nathan Seppa, Science News : December 23, 2010
Animals can be trained to sniff out TB in sputum samples, adding to accuracy of microscope test
Low-income countries struggling to keep tuberculosis under control might get a boost from an unlikely source—giant African rats.
The big rodents spotted hundreds of TB-positive sputum samples that a standard microscope test missed on first pass, researchers report in the December American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.
The TB bacterium currently infects one in three people worldwide, the World Health Organization estimates, with the highest rates in Africa.
Giant African rats, also called Gambian pouched rats (Cricetomys gambianus), are native to much of Africa and have been used before to sniff out land mines. Training captive-bred rats to detect TB takes about five or six months, says study coauthor Alan Poling, a psychologist and animal-learning expert at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. Attempts to train captured giant rats didn’t work because the animals proved unmanageable, he says. “In the wild, they’re really nasty.”
The rats are exposed to sputum samples through holes in the floor of a cage, and if they correctly pause for five seconds to smell a TB sample, they are rewarded with a mouthful of banana. Lingering over non-TB samples gets no reward. Eventually, the rats can check a string of holes moving “about as fast as they can walk,” Poling says.
In the largest analysis to date, Poling and a research team in Tanzania collected sputum samples from more than 10,000 people and tested them using a standard microscopic analysis for TB. The researchers found that about 1,400 people had the disease. The TB samples had been rendered noninfectious using heat and pressure, a safety measure designed to prevent transmission of live TB from dropped or spilled samples, Poling says.
When the rats sniffed the same sputum samples, the animals correctly identified more than 90 percent of those found as positive in the lab. But the rats also tagged more than 1,400 additional people as positive. When reanalyzed more closely under the microscope, those samples turned out to include 620 people who indeed had TB. Thus, while the standard test found that 13.3 percent of people were TB-positive, the rats bumped that figure up to more than 19 percent.
It may seem that the rats turned in a lot of false positives, sensing samples as TB-positive that a second microscope test couldn’t confirm. But many might not be false, Poling says. “We’re thinking that in at least some of these people, there are bacteria present that our people [using microscopes] didn’t see. There might be low concentrations.”
The gold standard for TB testing is to culture the bacteria in the sputum, but that can take weeks. “There’s a need to deploy a new generation of technologies to get new diagnostics out there against TB,” says Peter Hotez, a physician and microbiologist at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. “[Using rats] is definitely a low-tech approach,” he says.
But he says the rats’ accuracy rate would need to improve for this to become a standard screening strategy. A new lab test that uses a polymerase chain reaction is 98 percent accurate in detecting TB, researchers reported in the Sept. 9 New England Journal of Medicine. That technique, which copies key bacterial DNA, appears to be the TB test of the future, Hotez says. It is being tested in the field and may become commercially available soon.
Poling and his group are using the DNA test to verify results from the standard microscopy and the rat tests. But the DNA test currently costs about $20 per sample, he says, which is far too high for developing countries. It’s unclear how much the rats would cost per sample, he says, since the method has not been scaled up commercially. But once the rats are trained, they can whip through a dozen samples in less than a minute and be used again and again.
http://www.usnews.com/science/articles/2010/12/23/giant-rats-detect-tuberculosis.html
Animals can be trained to sniff out TB in sputum samples, adding to accuracy of microscope test
Low-income countries struggling to keep tuberculosis under control might get a boost from an unlikely source—giant African rats.
The big rodents spotted hundreds of TB-positive sputum samples that a standard microscope test missed on first pass, researchers report in the December American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.
The TB bacterium currently infects one in three people worldwide, the World Health Organization estimates, with the highest rates in Africa.
Giant African rats, also called Gambian pouched rats (Cricetomys gambianus), are native to much of Africa and have been used before to sniff out land mines. Training captive-bred rats to detect TB takes about five or six months, says study coauthor Alan Poling, a psychologist and animal-learning expert at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. Attempts to train captured giant rats didn’t work because the animals proved unmanageable, he says. “In the wild, they’re really nasty.”
The rats are exposed to sputum samples through holes in the floor of a cage, and if they correctly pause for five seconds to smell a TB sample, they are rewarded with a mouthful of banana. Lingering over non-TB samples gets no reward. Eventually, the rats can check a string of holes moving “about as fast as they can walk,” Poling says.
In the largest analysis to date, Poling and a research team in Tanzania collected sputum samples from more than 10,000 people and tested them using a standard microscopic analysis for TB. The researchers found that about 1,400 people had the disease. The TB samples had been rendered noninfectious using heat and pressure, a safety measure designed to prevent transmission of live TB from dropped or spilled samples, Poling says.
When the rats sniffed the same sputum samples, the animals correctly identified more than 90 percent of those found as positive in the lab. But the rats also tagged more than 1,400 additional people as positive. When reanalyzed more closely under the microscope, those samples turned out to include 620 people who indeed had TB. Thus, while the standard test found that 13.3 percent of people were TB-positive, the rats bumped that figure up to more than 19 percent.
It may seem that the rats turned in a lot of false positives, sensing samples as TB-positive that a second microscope test couldn’t confirm. But many might not be false, Poling says. “We’re thinking that in at least some of these people, there are bacteria present that our people [using microscopes] didn’t see. There might be low concentrations.”
The gold standard for TB testing is to culture the bacteria in the sputum, but that can take weeks. “There’s a need to deploy a new generation of technologies to get new diagnostics out there against TB,” says Peter Hotez, a physician and microbiologist at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. “[Using rats] is definitely a low-tech approach,” he says.
But he says the rats’ accuracy rate would need to improve for this to become a standard screening strategy. A new lab test that uses a polymerase chain reaction is 98 percent accurate in detecting TB, researchers reported in the Sept. 9 New England Journal of Medicine. That technique, which copies key bacterial DNA, appears to be the TB test of the future, Hotez says. It is being tested in the field and may become commercially available soon.
Poling and his group are using the DNA test to verify results from the standard microscopy and the rat tests. But the DNA test currently costs about $20 per sample, he says, which is far too high for developing countries. It’s unclear how much the rats would cost per sample, he says, since the method has not been scaled up commercially. But once the rats are trained, they can whip through a dozen samples in less than a minute and be used again and again.
http://www.usnews.com/science/articles/2010/12/23/giant-rats-detect-tuberculosis.html
Sunday, 12 September 2010
TUBERCULOSIS: Giant Rats sniff out land mines in Africa - Tuberculosis also Targeted
Evalynn J. Saeyang
September 09, 2010
Giant African rats are helping out villagers as they sniff out land mines! The rats were mostly hated but now they are loved and even cared for by the villagers, all because of their amazing ability to sniff out dangerous unexploded land mines.
CNN states that the rats are used to sniff out land mines from Mozambique’s civil war which ended in the early 1990s. The program is called Anti-Personnel Land Mines Detection Product Development (APOPO) and was concocted by Buddhist monk Bart Weetjens. The rats used to sniff out land mines are called HeroRats.
MailOnline reports that these amazing giant African pouched rats have also been taught to sniff out tuberculosis which is especially deadly to it’s African victims because several people there have HIV. Apparently, if tuberculosis is detected early enough, it will only cost $10 to treat.
BBC News states that the rats are being used because they are better able to sniff out land mines than their dog counterparts. Christopher Coxof APOPO said, “They are more mechanical than a dog and they are easier to transfer to different owners.”
The land mines location is discovered by trained rats who sniff it out then scratch at it’s surface while their trainer leads them aside and rewards them with some banana. After the rat is lead away, a trained bomb technician dismantles the land mine.
Hopefully these amazing rats will sniff out all the land mines in Africa and all the emerging and undiagnosed tuberculosis cases. Africa is a country is serious need of help, any kind of help. It’s people are dying in the masses because of AIDS and several other diseases. It’s just wonderful that wild rats were able to be trained thanks to banana treats.
http://news.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474978506487
September 09, 2010
Giant African rats are helping out villagers as they sniff out land mines! The rats were mostly hated but now they are loved and even cared for by the villagers, all because of their amazing ability to sniff out dangerous unexploded land mines.
CNN states that the rats are used to sniff out land mines from Mozambique’s civil war which ended in the early 1990s. The program is called Anti-Personnel Land Mines Detection Product Development (APOPO) and was concocted by Buddhist monk Bart Weetjens. The rats used to sniff out land mines are called HeroRats.
MailOnline reports that these amazing giant African pouched rats have also been taught to sniff out tuberculosis which is especially deadly to it’s African victims because several people there have HIV. Apparently, if tuberculosis is detected early enough, it will only cost $10 to treat.
BBC News states that the rats are being used because they are better able to sniff out land mines than their dog counterparts. Christopher Coxof APOPO said, “They are more mechanical than a dog and they are easier to transfer to different owners.”
The land mines location is discovered by trained rats who sniff it out then scratch at it’s surface while their trainer leads them aside and rewards them with some banana. After the rat is lead away, a trained bomb technician dismantles the land mine.
Hopefully these amazing rats will sniff out all the land mines in Africa and all the emerging and undiagnosed tuberculosis cases. Africa is a country is serious need of help, any kind of help. It’s people are dying in the masses because of AIDS and several other diseases. It’s just wonderful that wild rats were able to be trained thanks to banana treats.
http://news.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474978506487
Wednesday, 25 August 2010
MALNUTRITION: MOZAMBIQUE: Breed your own rats!
24 August 2010 (IRIN) - Albinio Matias, a Mozambican farmer, lost his daughter, Cassula, and his home to wildfires, which also damaged his crops for four consecutive years. Raising large domesticated rats could have saved him a great deal of pain."The fires were set by youngsters hunting for rats, and because our houses were close to the weeds they caught fire and I lost everything. I lost my daughter in 2006," said Matias, who lives in the Macossa district of Manica Province in central Mozambique. Hunters would start fires to flush out rodents from the forests and the bush to eat, and the blaze would often get out of hand, he told IRIN.Around 70 percent of Mozambique's 20 million people live in rural areas where every year thousands are displaced or lose their possessions, homes and crops to these fires. Manica Province's Forest and Wildlife Services said 43 wildfires were caused by rat hunters in 2007; in 2008 that figure rose to 60 and led to 15 deaths and the displacement of 200 families.Raising rats A new pilot project by the Initiative for Communal Lands (ICT), a local poverty reduction NGO, and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), to capture rats in the bush and forests to breed for consumption, has been delivering results.The initiative is based on the success of a similar project in Ghana, another African country affected by wildfires. In Mozambique the districts in Manica hit hardest in recent years - Macossa, Sussundenga, Gondola and Barue - were the first to benefit, said José Monteiro, a field officer at ICT."We are teaching the population to raise rats in large cages, so they don't have to set fire to the bush in order to catch the animals. People get the meat they are after, and we reduce wildfires." About 500 families were being helped to build cages, Monteiro told IRIN."Our district has suffered so much due to wildfires, simply because people are hunting for rats. With the experience from Ghana we think we will be able to eliminate the fires. Now people don't have to go out and hunt for the rats - they are right here in the community," Teófilo Mendonça, district administrator of Macossa, told IRIN."This year we have already seen a drop in the amount of wildfires," Mendonça said. "The rat project has already had an impact." Government figures show Mendonça might be right: over 1.3 million hectares of land were burnt in Manica in 2008, compared to just over 60,000 in 2009."The time of forest fires has passed," said Olívia Pablo, a Macossa resident who now tends to rats. Matias agreed: "I already see my suffering has diminished."
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