Mutant/GSA trainee
Joined: 15 Oct 2004
Posts: 81
Location: Romania
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The East African Standard (Nairobi)
October 3, 2005
Posted to the web October 3, 2005
Ken Ramani
Nairobi
Scientists at the Sokoine University of Agriculture, Tanzania, in conjunction with Tanzania People's Defence Forces, are training rats to be used in cargo screening, both in airports, seaports and border control posts. The trained rats will also be used in clearing anti-personnel landmines and detection of tuberculosis (TB) in human beings.
Currently only big and expensive manual scanners used in sea and airports causing unnecessary transport delays that lead to huge overhead costs to business people.
The new and cheap technology that uses vapour or Particle detection could replace the redundant scanner technology due to its speed and mobility.
Donor organisations and governments are funding the project. The Sokoine University rat project is among the many that have been discussed and approved by the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region (ICGLR) and will be implemented soon. It falls in the category of the Border Security Management, a project developed by ICGLR. An ICGLR preparatory meeting held in the Angolan capital, Luanda, last week was told that the technology will be applied in boarder zones of Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, Angola, Zambia, Democratic Republic of Congo Burundi and Tanzania. It will also be applied in and around refugee camps settlements in the boarder zones perceived to be vulnerable to landmines in the hands of armed groups. The Tanzanian scientists have now developed a new vapor detection technology that utilises olfactory sense of trained African giant pouched rats. The sniffer rats are trained from the age of four weeks according to a method developed by the project in a variety of training and evaluation cages. The project has a 30-acre of training and test fields, where more than 1,500 defused landmines and unexploded ordinances are buried.
The rats are taken there everyday early morning for training. After completion of the training, they are sent abroad for operational de-mining tasks while others remain behind and get specialised in the evaluation of samples derived from suspected minefields. According to the experts, the mine-detection rats have been tested according to the international Mine Action Standards (IMAS), officially accredited in Mozambique Mine Action Centre.
They are currently being applied in minefields in Mozambique as a complementary tool in integrated de-mining exercise. Mozambique, alongside Angola, are arguably the most mined countries in Africa, thanks to many years of civil wars that ended late 1990s.
Due to lack of appropriate technology, huge sums of cash have been sunk to de-mine areas that are actually not mined. |
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