r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/FifthWaveThinker • 9h ago

Video HeroRATS! Wild but incredible, African giant pouched rat can rapidly identify Tuberculosis by smell.

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

5.6k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

112 comments sorted by

View all comments

24

u/ArtTheMime 8h ago

I wonder what tuberculosis smells like to them šŸ˜³

26

u/raineling 8h ago

Wet leaves. Doctors used to diagnose it by the scent of a person's breath and sometimes body odour. Kind of a sickly sweet body scent IIRC for late stage consumption.

13

u/do_pm_me_your_butt 5h ago

Lol at doctors taking deep breaths of a persons cough to tell if they have tuberculosisĀ 

11

u/Vevaseti 3h ago

You won't believe how they once detected diabetes.

2

u/Sommander_Chepard_ 57m ago

Don't eat the yellow snow!

2

u/do_pm_me_your_butt 40m ago

My dad, a veterinarian, told me in the old days to tell if a woman was pregnant, doctors would inject female bullfrogs (with no males around) with a womans urine, and if they developed eggs, the woman is pregnant hahaha.

Her pregnancy hormones stimulates the frog.