A Realtime PCR machine for COVID-19 testing costs about 4-5 billion VND.
The idea is to train bees to become medical staff testing for COVID-19.
At Wageningen University’s bio-veterinary laboratory, researchers are raising a colony of 150 such bees and training them to detect COVID-19 patient samples.
If successful, it will be a testing machine that is 500 times cheaper and 2,000 times faster than a Realtime PCR machine.
Scientists trained bees by giving them a sugar solution every time they were exposed to the scent of a COVID-19 infected mink.
In the science of animal training, this is a process called Pavlovian conditioning.
By the end of the training, the bees at Wageningen University were able to identify a COVID-19 sample in just a few seconds, compared to several hours running a Realtime PCR machine.
Bees are not the first animals that scientists have trained to detect COVID-19 samples by scent.
The accuracy level of these tests is quite high.
Even so, scientists are still not sure whether trained animals are the best option for sniffing out COVID-19 cases outside the lab?
`No one is saying they can replace a PCR machine, but what they do could be very promising,` Holger Volk, a veterinary neurologist, told Nature.
But trained animals could be used to test for COVID-19 in places where medical equipment is scarce or modern machines are not accessible.
In addition, scientists at Wageningen University are also working on a very interesting idea.
A bee’s nose is actually more sensitive than a dog’s.
Now, imagine you could release a few bees into a room or an elevator in a building that has just had someone infected with COVID-19.
It’s very interesting and promising, isn’t it?
Refer to Businessinsider
