Africa in Transition » ‘HeroRATs’ Corner Landmines and Tuberculosis in Africa

During the 1990s, Bart Weetjens, a Belgian engineer, discovered that the giant pouched rat could be trained to detect explosives in a laboratory. Subsequently deployed in the field, the trained rodents have proven to be highly successful light-weight land mine detectors. The rats can detect explosives made of plastic as well as metal, and they are so light that they do not detonate them. By 2010, APOPO (an acronym in Dutch for ‘Anti-Personnel Landmines Detection Product Development’) cleared close to eight hundred thousand square meters of land, mostly in Mozambique, at the nominal cost of $1.50 per square meter. (Read more)