By Emma Mortiboy | Public Fundraising
A huge welcome to the autumn update for APOPO’s HeroRATs!
In Mine Action, the HeroRATs have been busy working around the world to free people and communities from the fear of landmines and other explosive remnants of war.
What do our HeroRATs find exactly?
We often talk about our HeroRATs finding both landmines and explosive remnants of war, but what is the difference? Landmines are deliberately placed explosive devices designed to be triggered by a person or vehicle. They can include both metal- and plastic-cased mines, and HeroRATs can detect both because they are searching for the scent of explosives rather than the material surrounding them.
Explosive remnants of war, or ERW, is a broader term for explosive weapons left behind by conflict. These can include unexploded artillery shells, grenades, mortars, rockets and air-dropped bombs. Cluster munition remnants can also remain hazardous long after fighting has ended. Cluster munitions release numerous smaller submunitions, sometimes called bomblets, across a wide area, and those that fail to explode as intended can remain dangerous for decades.
Cambodia
Cambodia has significant contamination from several of these types of explosives as a result of successive periods of conflict. APOPO's Cambodia teams have consequently encountered not only anti-personnel and anti-tank mines but also unexploded ordnance and cluster munition remnants. In 2025 alone, APOPO's Cambodia program reported finding 327 landmines, 66 cluster munitions and 270 other ERW, illustrating just how varied the explosive contamination can be.
Angola
While our HeroRATs in Angola have been waiting for re-accreditation, APOPO Angola recently welcomed a delegation from the Embassy of Japan in Angola to Seles Municipality in Cuanza Sul Province. Travelling from Luanda to Gabela, the delegation had an opportunity to see both ongoing demining operations and what happens after the work is finished. The visitors saw two completed clearance tasks at Elevação do Cawé and Elevação do Nguendela, where APOPO teams cleared 27,223 and 30,732 square meters, respectively. The significance of those numbers becomes much clearer on the ground: the land has already been returned to the community and is now being used for agriculture. The delegation also visited an active task to see the work that goes into making more contaminated land safe.
Azerbaijan
APOPO Azerbaijan's HeroRAT team has been officially re-accredited. The team's 11 rats and 6 handlers, originally from Cambodia, passed accreditation by ANAMA, the Azerbaijan National Agency for Mine Action, on September 30.
The team has since deployed to the liberated areas of the Karabakh region, working alongside Safe Point, which already partners with APOPO's Mine Detection Dogs (MDD), to clear landmines and explosive remnants of war near Khanabad village.
TB Detection
Our HeroRATs have been working to detect undiagnosed patients with tuberculosis (TB) across Ethiopia and Tanzania.
Every detection session includes some known TB-positive samples alongside the patient samples the HeroRAT is screening. These known positives allow the rat to be rewarded when they makes a correct indication, reinforcing the behavior that their trainers want the HeroRAT to maintain. The technicians presenting the samples, however, know which of these are the known positives, creating the possibility of very subtle, completely unintended cues. Something as small as leaving the opening above a known positive sample exposed for slightly longer could potentially give a rat additional information.
As featured in the video shown linked below, TB-detecting HeroRAT, Tamasha, now completes some of her detection sessions in the FALCON, APOPO's fully automated line cage, and APOPO is gradually transitioning towards greater use of this system. FALCON standardizes how every sample is presented, removing the opportunity for these inadvertent human cues. But according to Dr. Cindy Fast, APOPO's Head of Training and Research, this is actually only one of the advantages of automation.
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