Polish aid continues to support Tanzania in its fight against tuberculosis
05.12.2021
Health protection is one of the priorities of Poland's development cooperation with African countries. That is why this year we continue to subsidize the project of the APOPO organization implemented in Tanzania, which consists in detecting tuberculosis with the help of the southern giant pouched rats.
Tuberculosis is one of ten most common causes of death in Tanzania. It also causes other problems such as social and economic exclusion (feeling of shame and fear linked to diagnosis, admitting illness and treatment associated with, among others, the risk of losing a job, and thus often the only source of income for the whole family).
The APOPO organization has been developing a method of training the southern giant pouched rats gifted with remarkable sense of smell and intelligence, which are capable of detecting with great precision and speed the presence of tuberculosis in sputum samples collected from patients at clinics cooperating with this organization. Moreover, the smell of those rats is as sensitive or even more sensitive than locally applied microscopy of a sputum smear. The use of rats in this field is also cheaper than the use of traditional laboratory tests.
In 2019, the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Dar es Salaam, together with APOPO, implemented a project that extended the tuberculosis detection program in Tanzania by rats and provided APOPO with an ecological and reliable source of energy. Thanks to the project, other clinics in Dodoma and Morogoro regions were included in the tuberculosis detection program. Currently, Polish Aid is involved in a project aimed at accelerating the detection of tuberculosis in resource-limited environments in Dar es Salaam by increasing the detection rate of tuberculosis cases and making healthcare connected to this illness more accessible to more patients. Thanks to our support, three more clinics in Dar es Salaam already participate in the program.
Katarzyna Sobiecka, a representative of the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Dar es Salaam, has recently visited the laboratory for tuberculosis diagnostics with rats run by APOPO, which the organization set up in Dar es Salaam in 2016 and had the opportunity to see how working with the rats looks like in practice. In just a few minutes, the animal identified the suspicious samples among 50 samples subject to the test. This is a job that a traditional laboratory would have to spend several days on.
Read more:
https://www.gov.pl/web/polishaid/small--great-heroes-of-tanzanias-health-service
