VOA常速英语2018--疾病嗅探犬可以帮助阻止疟疾蔓延（在线收听）

Here’s how the study worked.Children in Ghana some of whom had malaria, some who did not were given socks to wear for one night, and the trained dogs tried to identify the socks that had evidence of the malarial parasite.The key malarial evidence, the people have malaria parasites produce specific odors, so they smell differently from other people.And most importantly, mosquitoes preferentially feed on people with malaria, so if mosquitoes can do, why not dogs?

这就是此项研究的操作方式。把袜子分发给加纳的孩子们，让孩子们穿一晚，孩子中有些患有疟疾，有些没有患疟疾，接着让受过训练的狗从中找出有疟原虫的袜子。关键的患疟疾的证据，即有疟疾的人会产生特殊的气味，所以他们的气味和其他人不一样。更重要的是，蚊子优先吸疟疾患者的血，所以，如果蚊子可以闻出疟疾，为何狗不能呢？

Dogs like Freya trained by the group Medical Detection Dogs were able to identify malaria correctly seventy percent of the time,and Lindsey says this could lead to new and really effective ways of stopping malaria from spreading.You’re getting really close to malaria elimination, you’re trying to find that the last remaining hot spots and who were those people infected rather than screening everyone.

像Freya这样的由医疗检测犬组训练出来的狗识别疟疾准确率高达百分之七十，Lindsey表示，这也许能带来阻止疟疾传播的新的、真正有效的方法。这就离消除疟疾很近了，你在试着找到最后剩下的重灾区，找到感染人群而非把每个人都检查一遍。

The dog might be good enough to go into the villages and find people.Lindsey says dogs are already on the frontlines of disease and contraband detection but may be able to detect a host of other illnesses as well.So the fact that I’m working with the dog handlers have worked off with their dogs to detect cancers and Parkinson’s disease,and they actually have dogs that work with diabetic patients that when they’re going into hypoglycemia, the dogs notify the alert persons.The medical detection team is also working with MIT to create a kind of e-nose that could do what the dogs do,but he says the dogs’ noses are so sensitive the technology doesn’t yet exist to match their sniffing power.

检测犬已经训练到能够进入村庄寻找病患了。Lindsey表示，检测犬已经在疾病和违禁品检测的前沿了，它们也许还能检测出更多的疾病。所以，我和检测犬训练者的工作取得了良好的成效，他们的检测犬能够检测癌症和帕金森病，还有一些检测犬与糖尿病患者一起工作，一旦糖尿病患者血糖过低，检测犬就会通知警报人员。医疗监测小组还和麻省理工合作，创造了一种模仿检测犬的电子鼻，但是表示狗的鼻子实在太灵敏，目前还不存在足以与狗嗅探能力相比的科技。