unit5,硕士生英语综合教程2 课本原文 电子版
红枫叶-以虫治虫
Unit5
(Para. 1) It was a year ago
that the term H1N1 entered the American
consciousness. In
April 2009, researchers at
the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC)
discovered that two children
in California had been infected with a new strain
of influenza virus
— originally dubbed
“swine flu” but eventually and more accurately
known as H1N1—
even as Mexican health
officials
grappled with major
outbreaks of a new flulike illness. By the end of
the month,
with new cases
popping up in New York City, Canada and Europe,
officials had come to realize they
had a
global emergency on their hands.
(Para. 2)
Within weeks, the H1N1 virus was spreading around
the world, and by June the
World Health
Organization (WHO) had raised the alert level
again, officially declaring an
influenza
pandemic. Since most people had no immune
protection against the H1N1 virus,
which had
been simmering in swine populations for years
before jumping into human
beings in Mexico, it
spread rapidly.
(Para. 3) U.S. cases
piled up in late spring, and both the sick and the
“worried
well” flooded hospitals, taxing
health care resources. Schools shut down,
sometimes for weeks,
to
stem the
spread of the disease, leaving millions of
schoolchildren — and their parents
—
stranded at home. In other countries, the response
was more severe: in Mexico, the
government
banned public gatherings; in China, travelers from
affected regions who showed
signs of flu were
quarantined.
(Para. 4) From the start, the
vast majority of H1N1 cases seemed relatively
mild, but
officials still had to work to keep
the population from panicking. “This is obviously
a cause for
concern,” said President Barack
Obama on April 27, 2009. “It’s not a cause for
alarm.”
(Para. 5) As it turned out, Obama
was right — almost painfully so. Pharmaceutical
companies had crashed an H1N1- vaccine-
production program, and governments around
the
world (including Washington) had drawn up hasty
plans to fend off a potential “second
wave” of
H1N1, which they feared could turn the upcoming
fall flu season into a public-health
disaster.
(Para. 6) Yet catastrophe never came,
and the total U.S. death toll from H1N1 —
about 13,000 people over the past year — was
considerably smaller than the 36,000 people
who are estimated to die each year from the
regular, seasonal flu. Millions of doses of
H1N1 vaccine expired unused on doctors’
shelves, and health officials are now under fire
for
overhyping what eventually seemed like a
harmless bug. So, was H1N1 much ado about
nothing?
(Para. 7) Not quite.
Understanding why H1N1 was, and remains, a
legitimate public
threat and how health
officials could have handled it better will help
when the next new virus
inevitably makes its
way into our bloodstreams.
(Para. 8)
Here are five key lessons from the 2009 H1N1 flu
pandemic.
(Para. 9a) At the start of the H1N1
pandemic, officials could already see the virus
was easily
transmissible — cases were
accumulating fast, and it took only a few weeks
for the virus to
reach nearly every corner of
the world.
(Para. 9b) But while
researchers knew from past pandemics that a new
flu virus like H1N1,
against which humans have
no immunity, could spread quickly, what they could
not
immediately gauge was whether it
could also be deadly. Some past pandemics had been
relatively mild, while others, such as the
1918 flu, which killed as many as 100 million
people
worldwide, had not. At the outset,
there was no way to know which kind of virus H1N1
would
turn out to be.
(Para. 10) In
hindsight, the 2009-10 pandemic looks relatively
mild — certainly much
milder than the initial
media panic might have led us to expect. Still, a
closer inspection of
H1N1 shows that it was no
trifle. Unlike seasonal flu, which tends to kill
the elderly and those
with underlying health
conditions, H1N1 proved disproportionately
dangerous to the young,
the healthy and the
pregnant.
(Para. 11a) A recent study
published in the journal BMC Infectious Diseases
found that
more than 75% of H1N1 cases
recorded in the early months of the pandemic
occurred in
people under age 30, with the
highest proportion in those ages 10 to 19. And
when researchers
at the National Institutes
of Health measured the impact of H1N1 in estimated
American
life-years lost — which gives more
weight to deaths among the young — they found that
it was
at least as serious as a typical flu
year; at its worst, it hit levels seen in the
pandemics of 1957
and 1968.
(Para. 11b)
Its death toll may have been lower than feared,
but H1N1, especially in the
early months,
stressed the U.S. health care system with large
numbers of young, sick flu
patients, and
ventilators and antivirals were sometimes in short
supply. “H1N1 was an
enormous challenge,” says
CDC director Thomas Frieden.
(Para. 12a)
When H1N1 struck, the WHO and other health
agencies had already been
preparing for a new
flu pandemic — just not the one that actually
arrived. Rather than from
the pork farms of
Mexico, officials thought the next pandemic would
emerge from the yards of
Asian chicken farms.
(Para. 12b) In the years since H5N1 avian
flu began simmering in Southeast Asia in 2003,
scientists and doctors had monitored the virus
closely, waiting for it to mutate to the point
that
it could spread easily from person to
person. The virus had already proved itself deadly
— it
has killed nearly 300 people to date —
but the question was when it would become
transmissible.
(Para. 13) It hasn’t
yet. While attention was focused on bird flu in
Southeast Asia, H1N1
was evolving in swine in
Mexico. In a way, the locus was a stroke of luck —
the Mexican
government reacted about as well
as a country could to a sudden outbreak, it did
not hide the
presence of the new virus.
(Para. 14) But the opening of an unexpected
front caught health officials off guard. The
lesson here isn’t that we should stop worrying
about bird flu or Southeast Asia — still the
birthplace of most new flu viruses — but that
in a globalized, heavily populated world, new
viral threats can come from anywhere.
(Para. 15a) Before H1N1 became known as
H1N1, it was popularly referred to as “swine
flu” because scientists determined that it
contained mostly pig flu genes. (That’s not
surprising:
pigs can be infected with both
avian and human flus and are an ideal genetic
mixing bowl.)
(Para. 15b) The term swine flu
was confusing, since the virus was circulating in
people and
was not being transmitted by swine
(unlike the avian flu H5N1, which is passed
primarily by
birds), but it was
instructive. It reminded us that new flu viruses
begin not in people but in
animals and that
the first humans to be affected tend to be those
who are in close contact with
animals.
(Para. 16) That means the right kind of
virological surveillance might be able to detect
potentially dangerous viruses while they’re
still in animals and even stamp them out
before they establish themselves in people.
The problem is that animal health gets
only a fraction of the funding and talent devoted
to human health — the World Organization for
Animal Health is a poor cousin to the World
Health Organization — even though the two
realms are intertwined.
(Para. 17a)
Over the past seven years, H1N1, H5N1 and SARS
have all emerged out of
animals to infect and
kill human beings. That trend must be stemmed. One
smart idea is the
Global Viral
Forecasting Initiative, an
NGO that
monitors populations that are highly exposed to
animals — such as hunters in
Africa — in hopes
of detecting new viruses as early as possible.
(Para. 17b) “You need earlier and earlier
capacity not to overlook the clinically evident
cases that can reveal a new outbreak and give
you maximum time for preparation,” says
Institute of Medicine president Dr. Harvey
Fineberg, who will lead an independent panel
review of the WHO’s response to the H1N1
outbreak.
(Para. 18a) The good thing about
the H1N1 vaccine was that it wasn’t technically
difficult
to create — vaccine makers designed
and produced it the same way they do regular,
seasonal
flu vaccines. The problem was the
timing.
(Para. 18b) By the time H1N1
emerged in the spring of 2009, production of the
next batch of
seasonal flu vaccines was
already well under way, so drug companies had
to hustle to
establish a separate production
line to get the new H1N1 vaccine manufactured and
available
for the upcoming flu season.
(Para. 19) At the same time, global vaccine
production was in general decline, and the U.S.
had very little vaccine-manufacturing capacity
left. Worse, there were no official channels of
pandemic-level vaccine distribution.
Washington promised millions of doses of H1N1
vaccine in
time for the start of flu season in
October 2009, but distribution was repeatedly
delayed while
federal, state and local
officials struggled to coordinate how best to hand
out the doses. If
H1N1 had been truly severe,
those delays could have cost lives.
(Para.
20a) But the major hindrance is the way
vaccines are currently manufactured —
grown in
individual doses in batches of chicken eggs.
While flu vaccines take months to
produce, flu
viruses spread around the planet in a matter of
days.
(Para. 20b) So unless the U.S. and
other wealthy nations upgrade their vaccine-
production
strategies (experimental cell-based
techniques may be able to churn out new
vaccines
much more quickly) and add more
capacity, we’re guaranteed to struggle to defend
against the
next pandemic. Vaccines may
represent the best line of defense against a new
flu virus, but not
if they’re too slow to do
any good.
(Para. 21) Still, it bears
noting that vaccines are not the only defense
against a flu virus.
Other, simpler strategies
— like hand washing, sanitation and distancing
measures like keeping
sick people at home —
can quickly stem the spread of a virus.
(Para. 22a) The main concern going forward
should not be the way health officials
responded to the last pandemic but how we will
respond to the next one. And that may prove
worrisome: the perception that
officials overhyped and overreacted to the H1N1
pandemic
may make the public less inclined to
react appropriately the next time around.
(Para. 22b) The fact that vaccination
rates in the U.S. were still fairly low during the
latest
flu season — Harvard researchers
estimate that 6 out of 10 adults were not
vaccinated —
indicates an abiding skepticism
toward public health. But while we got off
relatively
unscathed this time, next time
we may not be so lucky.
(Para. 23) The
only way to defuse public skepticism is for
health officials to
communicate better what
they know about an outbreak — and even more
important, what
they don’t know about it.
Washington officials did an admirable job putting
out information in
the early days of the H1N1
pandemic, but they were less successful at putting
that information
in context. There wasn’t
enough explanation of what a “pandemic” really
meant: that it
referred only to the
transmissibility of the new virus, not its
virulence.
(Para. 24) Leaving
interpretation of the data to the media, whose
coverage tends to swing
between extremes, is
not a good idea. In an age of twitter and
transparency, there’s no substitute for
official honesty. “Communication in 2010 is a
really tricky situation,” says Anne
Schuchat, director of the CDC’s National Center
for
Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.
“This was the first pandemic done in the age of
the
Internet.” Chances are it won’t
be the last — but if we learn from H1N1, at least
we’ll be prepared.