The bacteria that cause a common food-borne illness show low drug resistance in Australia, unlike similar strains from the United States and Europe, a study has found. Scientists behind the finding say Australia’s de facto ban on certain antibiotics in poultry(家禽) and other livestock. helps explain why. In the study, researchers analyzed samples of Campylobacter jejuni (空肠弯曲杆菌) bacteria from 585 patients in five Australian states. Scientists found that only 2 percent of the samples were resistant to ciprofloxacin (环丙沙星), one of the group of antibiotics known as fluoroquinolonones. By contrast, 18 percent of Campylobacter (弧形杆菌) samples in U.S. patients are immune to fluoroquinolonones, which have been used in the U.S. to prevent or treat respiratory(呼吸的) disease in poultry for a decade. The study, led by Leanne Unicomb, a graduate student at Australian National University in Canberra, was published in the May issue of the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. "The findings add to the growing body of evidence suggestive of the problems of using fluoroquinolonones in food- producing animals," Unicomb wrote in an email. Campylobacter is the most common food-borne disease in the U.S. and many other industrialized countries. People can contract the pathogen(病原体) by consuming undercooked poultry or meat, raw milk, or contaminated(被污染的) water. Symptoms include fever, vomiting, and diarrhea(腹泻). In rare cases, the disease can trigger paralysis or death. "In most industrial countries Campylobacter is more commonly reported than Salmonella (沙门氏菌), a better-known cause of food poisoning," Unicomb said. "The number of cases of Campylobacter has been on the rise in Australia since the early 90’s." In the U.S., about 1.4 million people contracted Campylobacter infections last year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia. While the infection rate in the U.S. has dropped over the last decade, the bacteria have grown more drug-rasistant. According to the CDC, surveys between 1986 and 1990 found no signs of resistance to the antibiotics in U.S. Campylobacter infections. But by 1997, strains resistant to the antibiotics accounted for 12 percent of human cases. In 2001 the figure climbed to 18 percent. Public health experts say many factors contribute to Campylobacter’s drug resistance; the widespread use of fluoroquinolonones by U.S. poultry farmers over the past decade is one of them. Fluoroquinolonones were first approved for use in humans by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1986. In 1995 the FDA granted poultry farmers permission to the use the drugs in livestock. Last year the FDA banned the antibiotic from food-producing animals, citing the concerns raised by public health experts over drug-resistant bacteria. Frederick Angulo, an epidemiologist with the CDC, monitors the drag resistance of food-borne pathogens in the U.S. food supply. "The people who are most likely to get infected with food-borne diseases include the most vulnerable people in the population—infants and young children and also the elderly," he said. He says that Campylobacter infections are entirely preventable, as is the bacteria’s antibiotic resistance. "In many ways what’s occurring with Campylobacter is an indicator for a broader issue, which is...antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the food supply," he said. Why do food-borne pathogens in Australia show low drag resistance
阅读下面这篇短文,短文后列出了7个句子,请根据短文的内容对每个句子作出判断。如果该句提供的是正确信息,请选择A项;如果该句提供的错误信息,请选择B项;如果该句的信息文章中没有提及,请选择C项。 An Observation and an Explanation It is worth looking at one or two aspects of the way a mother behaves towards her baby. The usual fondling, cuddling and cleaning require little comment, but the position in which she holds the baby against her body when resting is rather revealing. Careful studies have shown the fact that 80 percent of mothers hold their infants in their left arms, holding them against the left side of their bodies. If asked to explain the significance of this preference most people reply that it is obviously the result of the predominance of right-handedness in the population. By holding the babies in their left arms, the mothers keep their dominant arm free for manipulations. But a detailed analysis shows that this is not the case. True, there is a slight difference between right-handed and left-handed females; but not enough to provide adequate explanation. It emerges that 83 percent of right-handed mothers hold the baby on the left side, but so do 78 percent of left-handed mothers. In other words, only 22 percent of the left-handed mothers have their dominant hands free for actions. Clearly there must be some other, less obvious explanation. The only other clue comes from the fact that the heart is on the side of the mother’s body. Could it be that the sound of her heart beat is the vital factor And in What way Thinking along these lines it was argued that perhaps during its existence inside the body of the mother the unborn baby get used to the sound of the heart beat. If this is so, then the re-discovery of this familiar sound after birth might have a claiming effect on the infant, especially as it has just been born into a strange and frighteningly new world, if this is so then the mother would, somehow, soon arrive at the discovery that her baby is more at peace if held on the left against her heart than on the right. We can learn a lot by observing the position in which a mother holds her baby against her body.
A. Right
B. Wrong
C. Not mentioned
Pollution: A Life and Death Issue One of the main themes of Planet under Pressure is the way many of the Earth’s environmental crises reinforce one another. Pollution is an obvious example—we do not have the option of growing food, or finding enough water, on a squeaky- clean planet, but on one increasingly tarnished and trashed by the way we have used it so far. Cutting waste and clearing up pollution cost money. Yet time and again it is the quest for wealth that generates much of the mess in the first place. Living in a way that is less damaging to the Earth is not easy, but it is vital, because pollution is pervasive and often life-threatening. The pesticide DDT can be effective against ______. [A] malaria [C] animals [B] wildlife [D] human nervous system
Air: the World Health Organization (WHO) says three million people are killed worldwide by outdoor air pollution annually from vehicles and industrial emissions, and 1.6 million indoors through using solid fuel. Most are in poor countries.
B. Water: diseases carried in water are responsible for 80% of illnesses and deaths in developing countries, killing a child every eight seconds. Each year 2.1 million people die from diarrhoeal(痢疾的) diseases associated with poor water.
C. Soil: contaminated land is a problem in industrialized countries, where former factories and power stations can leave waste like heavy metals in the soil. It can also occur in developing countries, sometimes used for dumping pesticides. Agriculture can pollute land with pesticides, nitrate-rich fertilizers and slurry from livestock. And when the contamination reaches rivers it damages life there, and can even create dead zones off the coast, as in the Gulf of Mexico.
D. Chronic Problem
E. Chemicals are a frequent pollutant. When we think of chemical contamination it is often images of events like Bhopal that come to mind. But the problem is widespread. One study says 7-20% of cancers are attributable to poor air and pollution in homes and workplaces. The WHO, concerned about chemicals that persist and build up in the body, especially in the young, says we may "be conducting a large-scale experiment with children’s health".
F. Some man-made chemicals, endocrine(内分泌) disruptors like phthalates(酞酸盐) and nonylphenol—a breakdown product of spermicides (杀精子剂), cosmetics and detergents—are blamed for causing changes in the genitals of some animals. Affected species include polar bears—so not even the Arctic is immune. And the chemicals climb the food chain, from fish to mammals, and to us.About 70,000 chemicals are on the market, with around 1,500 new ones appearing annually. At least 30,000 are thought never to have been comprehensively tested for their possible risks to people.At first glance, the plastic buckets stacked in the comer of the environmental NGO office took like any others. But the containers are an unlikely weapon in one poor community’s fight against oil companies which they say are responsible for widespread ill-health caused by years of pollution. The vessels are used by a network of local volunteers, known as the Bucket Brigade, to gather air samples in neighborhoods bordering oil refineries, as part of a campaign to monitor and document air pollution which they believe is coming from the plants.
G. In South Africa, as in many developing and newly industrialized countries, legislation on air pollution has failed to keep pace with mushrooming industries. So local residents, like many in poor communities around the globe, have faced the problem of investigating their claim that industries on their doorsteps are making them sick.
H. Trade-off
I. But the snag is that modem society demands many of them, and some are essential for survival. So while we invoke the precautionary principle, which always recommends erring on the side of caution, we have to recognize there will be trade-offs to be made.
J. The pesticide DDT does great damage to wildlife and can affect the human nervous system, but can also be effective against malaria(疟疾). Where does the priority lie
K. The industrialized world has not yet cleaned up the mess it created, but it is reaping the benefits of the pollution it has caused. It can hardly tell the developing countries that they have no right to follow suit.Another complication in tackling pollution is that it does not respect political frontiers. There is a U.N. convention on trans-boundary air pollution, but that cannot cover every problem that can arise between neighbors, or between states which do not sham a border, perhaps the best example is climate change—the countries of the world share one atmosphere, and what one does can affect everyone.
L. For One and All
M. One of the principles that are supposed to apply here is simple—the polluter pays. Sometimes it is obvious who is to blame and who must pay the price, but it is not always straightforward to work out just who is the polluter, or whether the rest of us would be happy to pay the price of stopping the pollution.
N. One way of cleaning up after ourselves would be to throw less away, designing products to be recycled or even just to last longer.
O. Previous generations worked on the assumption that discarding our waste was a proper way to get rid of it, so we used to dump nuclear materials and other potential hazards at sea, confident they would be dispersed in the depths.
P. We now think that is too risky because, as one author wrote, "there’s no such place as ’away’, and there’s no such person as the ’other’."
Q. Irritating Air
R. Despite recent improvements, however, the health problems are still there. A 2002 medical study, carried out by Durban’s Nelson Mandela School of Medicine and a U.S. university, found that an abnormally high 52% of students and teachers at a primary school bordering the Engen plant suffered from asthma (哮喘). It found that increases in air pollution tended to aggravate asthma symptoms in children.
S. The petrol producers do not dispute the findings but argue that researchers were Unable to establish a Causal link between air pollution and the high prevalence of asthma among the school population.
T. For the community, the next step is to take legal action. But, according to internationally recognized environmentalist Bobby Peek, targeting the companies would ha difficult as it would be near-impossible to prove that illnesses suffered were caused by pollution coming from a particular plant.
U. Mr. Peek, who grew up beneath Engen’s stacks, says the activists are now considering taking action against the authorities. "We are now looking at suing the government on constitutional grounds, for failing to ensure our right to protection from a harmful environment as stipulated in the constitution," he said.
V. Legislative ChangeA new batch (批) of environmental laws, the National Air Quality Management Act, has just been passed by the South African parliament to replace outdated 1965 legislation with tighter controls and tougher sanctions.
W. Martinus van Schalkwyk, the minister of environmental affairs and tourism, visited the south Durban basin earlier this year and said there were measures in place to improve the situation. "I share the anger and frustration of this community. It is long overdue," he told the South African Broadcasting Corporation.
X. The local authorities have also established a "Multi-Point Plan" for the area. They say it is a powerful model for tackling pollution and points to a 40% reduction in sulphur dioxide emissions in recent years.
第二篇 Male and Female Pilots Cause Accidents Differently Male pilots flying general aviation (private) aircraft in the United States are more likely to crash due to inattention or flawed decision-making, while female pilots are more likely to crash from mishandling the aircraft. These are the results of a study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. The study identifies the differences between male and female pilots in terms of circumstances of the crash and the type of pilots error involved. "Crashes of general aviation aircraft account for 85 percent of all aviation deaths in the United States. The crash rate for male pilots as for motor vehicle drivers, exceeds that of crashes of female pilots," explains Susan P. Baker, MPH, professor of health policy and management at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. "Because pilot youth and inexperience are established contributors to aviation crashes, we focused on only mature pilots, to determine the gender differences in the masons for the crash." The researchers extracted data for this study from a large research project on pilot aging and flight safety. The data were gathered from general aviation crashes of airplanes and helicopters between 1983 and 1997, involving 144 female pilots and 267 male pilots aged 40--63. Female pilots were matched with male pilots in a 1:2 ratio, by age, classes of medical and pilot certificates, state or area of crash, and year of crash. Then the circumstances of the crashes and the pilot error involved were categorized and coded without knowledge of pilot gender. The researchers found that loss of control on landing or takeoff was the most common circumstance for both sexes, leading to 59 percent of female pilots’ crashes and 36 percent of males’. Experiencing mechanical failure, running out of fuel, and landing the plane with the landing gear up were among the factors more likely with males, while stalling was more likely with females. The majority of the crashes--95 percent for females and 88 percent for males--involved at least one type of pilot error. Mishandling aircraft kinetics was the most common error for both sexes, but was more common among females(accounting for 81 percent of the crashes) than males (accounting for 48 percent). Males, however, appeared more likely to be guilty of poor decision-making, risk-taking, and inattentiveness, examples of which include misjudging weather and Visibility or flying an aircraft with a known defect. Females, though more likely to mishandle or lose control of the aircraft, were generally more careful than their male counterparts. inattention n.疏忽 flawed adj. 有缺陷的 mishandle v. 瞎弄,乱处理 MPH(Master of Public Health) 公共卫生硕士 stall v. (飞机) 失速, (发动机) 熄火 kinetics n. 动力学 Which of the statements is NOT true according to the second paragraph
A. Crashes of general aviation aircraft are a major source of aviation accidents in the United States.
B. Male pilots, like male vehicle drivers, are more likely to have accidents than female pilots.
C. It is commonly known that aircraft crashes are mostly caused by young and inexperienced pilots.
D. Only mature pilots are studied to determine the gender differences in the reasons for aircraft crash.