本集内容

Dogs could help detect malaria 狗能从袜子里 “闻” 出人是否患有疟疾

学习要点

有关 “dogs 狗” 的词汇

边看边答

When the children have malaria, how effective are the dogs at detecting it?

文字稿

They're our four-legged friends, but could they help fight one of our worst enemies? Malaria infects more than two hundred million people every year. But now dogs are on the scent.

狗是我们的四条腿朋友，但它们能帮助对抗我们最大的一个敌人吗？每年有两亿多人感染疟疾。而现在，狗嗅出了该病的蛛丝马迹。

Socks from children in the Gambia were sent to the Medical Detection Dogs charity here in Milton Keynes. It’s taken training, but these pooches get it right 70% of the time if the children have malaria. But if the children were disease free, the dogs got it wrong 10% of the time.

冈比亚儿童穿过的袜子被送至这家位于英国米尔顿凯恩斯的慈善机构 “医疗检测犬”。虽然需要经受训练，但如果孩子们患有疟疾，这些狗狗判断正确的概率是70%。但如果孩子们没有患病，这些狗判断错误的概率则是10%。

It's still early stages but the study shows dogs have potential.

虽然该研究仍处于早期阶段，但它表明狗有这方面的潜力。

Chelci Squires, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
The most important thing with this is that it is much faster than current, existing, rapid diagnostic tests which can take up to 20 minutes and actually require a fully trained professional to do. Whereas this - if we had the Medical Detection Dogs going round a community, it will allow the whole community to be surveyed in a very short space of time.

切尔茜·斯奎尔斯 伦敦卫生与热带医学院
“最重要的是，这种方式比现有的快速诊断测试要快得多，测试需要二十分钟，而且还需要一位受过全面培训的专业人士来完成。然而，如果我们带着医疗检测犬到社区里转一圈，就可以在很短的时间内查完整个社区的情况。”

The hope is dogs could work at airports to sniff out passengers with malaria to stop the disease spreading. But there's still a long way to go before dogs can join the fight.

人们希望狗能够在机场工作，嗅出感染疟疾的乘客，从而阻止疾病的传播。但要让狗加入与疾病的斗争之前，还有很长的道路要走。

The researchers will need to improve the dogs’ accuracy, test them on people rather than socks and investigate whether the animals can sniff out different strains of malaria.

这些研究人员需要提高狗检测的准确率，让它们在人身上，而不是在袜子上测试，并研究这种动物能否闻出不同种类的疟疾。

词汇

four-legged friends 四条腿的朋友，对狗的爱称

on the scent （在调查中）获得线索

pooches 狗

sniff out 发现（人或事物）

你知道吗？

A dog's sense of smell is estimated to be ten thousand to one hundred thousand times as good as ours. While we have only six million smell receptors in our noses, dogs have up to three hundred million.

据估算，狗的嗅觉比人类的嗅觉要敏锐一万至十万倍。我们的鼻子里只有六百万个嗅觉感受器，而狗的嗅觉感受器却多达三亿个。

问题答案

The dogs are able to detect the malaria 70% of the time.