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(单词翻译:双击或拖选)
More people are dying from infections that don't respond to conventional antibiotics2
A new analysis from the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation4 shows nearly twice as many people worldwide died from antibiotic1 resistance in 2019 than from HIV/AIDS.
DEBBIE ELLIOTT, HOST:
As if the COVID pandemic isn't enough, another global health crisis is looming5 - drug-resistant6 bacteria. You may have heard them called superbugs. A new study finds that antibiotic resistance is more of a problem than many researchers had previously7 thought, and it finds that bacteria continue to mutate to evade8 some of modern medicine's most powerful drugs. NPR's Jason Beaubien reports.
JASON BEAUBIEN, BYLINE9: A new study in the medical journal The Lancet finds that the degree to which bacteria are mutating to evade antibiotics is happening at a far more rapid pace than many researchers had previously forecast. The paper calculates that in 2019, antibiotic-resistant infections directly killed 1.2 million people and played a role in 5 million more deaths worldwide.
CHRIS MURRAY: That resistance out there is actually now one of the leading causes of death in the world.
BEAUBIEN: Chris Murray, the director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, is one of the authors of the new study. Murray and his colleagues analyzed10 health data from 204 countries to try to tally11 the growing impact of antibiotic resistance globally.
MURRAY: The more we use the antibiotics, the more likely we are to see resistant pathogens spread.
BEAUBIEN: These resistant pathogens are killing12 people not just in the infectious disease ward13 of a hospital; they cause untreatable blood infections, new strains of pneumonia14, relentless15 urinary tract16 infections, gangrenous wounds and deadly cases of sepsis, among other conditions. And these dangerous new strains of bacteria are emerging all over the world.
MURRAY: In the past, I think we all thought that in some sense you had to be rich enough to use a lot of antibiotics inappropriately to have this problem. But that's not the case.
BEAUBIEN: And just as the COVID pandemic has demonstrated, a pathogen that emerges in one part of the world can now quickly show up just about any place else. Dr. Helen Boucher is an infectious disease physician at Tufts Medical Center in Boston.
HELEN BOUCHER: It's a wicked problem that affects everybody everywhere. So we see problems with antibiotic resistance in healthy people, outpatients, young women, school teachers with urinary tract infections, to critical care patients who have pneumonia in the ICU and COVID patients who get so-called secondary bacterial17 infections after their COVID.
BEAUBIEN: Boucher is now the interim18 dean of Tufts University School of Medicine. But earlier in her career, in the mid-'90s as a doctor, she remembers starting to see lab reports for patients in which one antibiotic after another was coming up as resistant.
BOUCHER: I also sadly remember within the last 10 years having to send a patient home on hospice because I couldn't treat their infection.
BEAUBIEN: Which she says was devastating19 and counter to her vision of herself as a doctor.
BOUCHER: That's not something we sign up to do as infectious disease doctors, right? We cure infections. We help to cure infections so that the patient can live their full life. So this evolution to a time where we have patients for whom we don't have any antibiotic options has happened during my career, and it's awful.
BEAUBIEN: Boucher says this new study is important because it helps to quantify how much of a problem antibiotic resistance is globally so that steps can be taken to try to protect the effectiveness of existing drugs and, hopefully, develop new ones.
Jason Beaubien, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF BILL LAURENCE'S "MADELEINE")
1 antibiotic | |
adj.抗菌的;n.抗生素 | |
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2 antibiotics | |
n.(用作复数)抗生素;(用作单数)抗生物质的研究;抗生素,抗菌素( antibiotic的名词复数 ) | |
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3 transcript | |
n.抄本,誊本,副本,肄业证书 | |
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4 evaluation | |
n.估价,评价;赋值 | |
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5 looming | |
n.上现蜃景(光通过低层大气发生异常折射形成的一种海市蜃楼)v.隐约出现,阴森地逼近( loom的现在分词 );隐约出现,阴森地逼近 | |
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6 resistant | |
adj.(to)抵抗的,有抵抗力的 | |
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7 previously | |
adv.以前,先前(地) | |
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8 evade | |
vt.逃避,回避;避开,躲避 | |
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9 byline | |
n.署名;v.署名 | |
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10 analyzed | |
v.分析( analyze的过去式和过去分词 );分解;解释;对…进行心理分析 | |
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11 tally | |
n.计数器,记分,一致,测量;vt.计算,记录,使一致;vi.计算,记分,一致 | |
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12 killing | |
n.巨额利润;突然赚大钱,发大财 | |
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13 ward | |
n.守卫,监护,病房,行政区,由监护人或法院保护的人(尤指儿童);vt.守护,躲开 | |
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14 pneumonia | |
n.肺炎 | |
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15 relentless | |
adj.残酷的,不留情的,无怜悯心的 | |
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16 tract | |
n.传单,小册子,大片(土地或森林) | |
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17 bacterial | |
a.细菌的 | |
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18 interim | |
adj.暂时的,临时的;n.间歇,过渡期间 | |
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19 devastating | |
adj.毁灭性的,令人震惊的,强有力的 | |
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