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美国国家公共电台 NPR--How do pandemics begin? There's a new theory — and a new strategy to thwart them

时间:2023-11-09 03:11来源:互联网 提供网友:nan   字体: [ ]
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How do pandemics begin? There's a new theory — and a new strategy to thwart1 them

Transcript2

The illness struck the little baby suddenly.

It was a hot, sticky day late in the summer of 2017. Only 5 months old at the time, her little boy was a peaceful infant, his mother recalls. "He didn't make much of a fuss."

The family lives in a small fishing town near the South China Sea in Sarawak, Malaysia, at the mouth of the Rajang River. Their tidy home sits atop stilts3, above a maze4 of canals and families' rowboats tied to piers5.

She has six children now; the baby was her fifth. We aren't using their names to protect the family from stigma6 around the son's illness.

On that humid August day, something was terribly wrong with her child. First, he became feverish7. The mother thought he might have the flu or a cold. "The fever went away quickly," she says. But by evening, the child began coughing and struggled to catch his breath. "He was breathing very fast," she remembers.

She took the baby to the nearest clinic, but his condition deteriorated8. Doctors rushed them to the nearest city, Sibu. It's three hours away by ambulance, depending on how the ferries are running.

At the hospital, doctors admitted the infant to the intensive care unit. By then, the baby's lungs had begun to fail. They were filled with mucus. He couldn't absorb enough oxygen, his mother says, and doctors connected him to a machine to help him breathe.

For three long days, the child didn't get better. His mother worried for his life. "I was so concerned," she says.

Hidden viruses: how pandemics really begin

NPR is running a series on spillover viruses — that's when animal pathogens jump into people. Researchers used to think spillovers were rare events. Now it is clear they happen all the time. That has changed how scientists look for new deadly viruses. To learn more, we traveled to Guatemala and Bangladesh, to Borneo and South Africa.

We have a quiz for you to test your spillover knowledge. But we'd also like you to quiz us. Send your questions about spillovers to [email protected] with "spillovers" in the subject line. We'll answer questions in a follow-up post when the series concludes in mid-February.

He had pneumonia9. "But doctors didn't know why," she says. They ran tests looking for a cause — a bacterium10 or virus. All the tests for the usual culprits came back negative.

But one pediatrician at the hospital had the foresight11 to know that scientists might one day have the tools to figure out the cause of the child's life-threatening pneumonia and that perhaps he had a pathogen that no one had detected before. "We are looking for novel infections, even types of viruses that we might not be aware of," says Dr. Teck-Hock Toh, who teaches at SEGi University and heads the Clinical Research Centre at Sibu Hospital.

Toh's team took a little white swab, like the ones in COVID-19 testing kits12, and scraped inside the infant's nose. They took the sample to the laboratory, extracted the genetic14 material from the possible pathogens present and stored the sample in a freezer. In 2016 and 2017, Toh and his team collected about 600 samples like this one.

What doctors eventually found inside the sample — inside the baby's respiratory tract13 — has fueled a shift in scientists' understanding of how pandemics begin and made them reconsider the way they search for new threatening viruses. It has made them realize there could be an easier, more efficient way to find viruses like SARS-CoV-2 before they evolve into a global nightmare.

Spillovers of a virus from animals to humans are not as rare as scientists used to think. Here are some 45 possible human cases documented since November 2021.

A table showing documented cases of possible spillovers of dog coronavirus, pig coronavirus and MERS by year, animal and country.

Note: Dog coronavirus is associated with mild to moderate illness in adults but more severe respiratory symptoms in young children, including fever, coughing, difficulty breathing and pneumonia. The pig coronavirus is associated with fever in children. Symptoms for the MERS virus in Kenya are unknown.

For decades, scientists pretty much thought they understood how pandemics, such as COVID-19, began. It centers on this idea of what's called spillover.

Most new pathogens, up to 75%, come from animals. They're often viruses that have been circulating in animals for decades, even centuries. At some point, they jump — or "spill over" — into people.

For the past 10 years, I've been a global health reporter at NPR. That whole time, I've heard the same idea repeated over and over again about spillovers: They are extremely rare. Animal viruses tend to stay in their animal host. One way scientists have described it is that a virus spilling over is, in a way, winning the lottery15: The virus is in the right place at the right time, and on top of that, it has special, rare characteristics that allow it to infect people. For all these events to coincide is remarkably16 rare, the thinking went.

This theory has shaped how scientists look for new deadly pathogens — or try to predict which ones could cause future pandemics. In particular, it led scientists to focus on searching for new viruses in wild animals. Since 2009, the U.S. government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars trapping wild animals, such as bats and rodents17, cataloging all the viruses circulating in their bodies and then trying to predict which of these viruses will most likely spill over into people and cause a costly18 outbreak or pandemic. Unfortunately, this effort failed to detect SARS-CoV-2 before the virus could spread to multiple continents.

Over the past few years, a growing number of virologists and epidemiologists have begun to question whether this approach is feasible. Some have blatantly19 said it won't work.

"I think like projects cataloging viruses, doing virus discovery [in wild animals] is interesting from a scientific standpoint," says evolutionary20 biologist Stephen Goldstein at the University of Utah. "But from the standpoint of predicting pandemics, I think it's a ridiculous concept." The numbers just don't make sense, Goldstein says. Animals contain more than a million viruses, and only a tiny, tiny fraction of those will ever be able to infect people.

But what if the tiny fraction of animal viruses that do infect people actually jump into people way more frequently than scientists thought? What if spillovers aren't extremely rare but are common enough that scientists can actually detect them inside people?

Over the past few decades, few studies have actually looked for spillovers inside people to see how common they are.

In fact, scientists really haven't had the tools — or funding — to detect new viruses inside people, says Dr. Gregory Gray, who's an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.

"We probably have novel viruses in North America infecting people who work a lot with animals, especially domestic animals," Gray says. "We're just missing them because we don't often have the tools to pick them up."

Take that 5-month-old's illness in 2017, for instance. When a person comes to a hospital with a severe respiratory infection, it doesn't matter whether they're in Sarawak, Malaysia, or San Francisco, Calif. Doctors run tests to see what's causing the infection. But this panel of tests identifies the source of an infection only about 40% of the time, says virologist John Lednicky at the University of Florida. "I like to think about it as 60% of the time doctors have absolutely no idea what is causing the respiratory illness."

The problem is that the current panel of tests can detect only specific — and known — pathogens. "We test for about four to seven viruses and maybe a handful, or more, other organisms," Toh says. Doctors can't pick up new viruses that scientists haven't discovered yet.

Some scientists have been wondering: What are these other, unknown pathogens? Could some of them be new viruses spilling over from animals that scientists have never detected because nobody has really looked inside people?

A few years ago, Toh decided21 to try answering those questions. He teamed up with Gray at UTMB, who for 30 years has been studying respiratory infections in people who have worked with animals. Together, they focused their attention on one important family of viruses: coronaviruses.

Coronaviruses under investigation22

When SARS-CoV-2 emerged in Wuhan, China, in 2019, scientists knew of six coronaviruses that could infect humans: SARS-CoV-1, which most likely jumps from civet cats into people; MERS, which jumps from camels into people; and four other coronaviruses that generally cause a common cold and have uncertain animal origins.

Outside humans, though, there may be about 1,200 unique coronaviruses, Gray says, infecting everything from waterfowl and rodents to monkeys and bats.

He thought that perhaps some of these animal coronaviruses are spilling over into people, making them sick and even putting them in the hospital. "So I asked postdoctoral fellow Leshan Xiu if he could develop a diagnostic tool that would capture all coronaviruses inside the respiratory tracts23 of pneumonia patients," Gray says. "That's what he designed. It's a very sensitive assay24. It gives a signal if any coronavirus is present, and then you can sequence the signal to see what coronavirus is present" — and whether it's one that's been seen before in humans.

When Gray and Xiu were ready to test the tool, Toh over in Malaysia already had the perfect samples to try: the ones taken from pneumonia patients in 2017, including the sample from the baby boy's respiratory tract.

Toh mailed Gray's team about 300 of the patient samples, frozen on liquid nitrogen. And then with Xiu's new tool, they tested each sample one by one for signs of infections with a new coronavirus.

Right away, the team caught a signal, and not just in one or two patients but in eight, including the child. "The tool suggested nearly 3% of the patients were infected with animal coronaviruses that were not previously25 known to be human pathogens," Gray says. "That's a remarkable26 percentage." And it suggests this new coronavirus isn't extremely rare but could actually be relatively27 common in several parts of the world.

The results were so remarkable, in fact, that Gray initially28 thought perhaps they were due to contamination or a defect in the tool. "It was hard to believe. I even wondered if maybe we had some sort of problem with the lab."

At this point, Gray and his team didn't know exactly which coronavirus they were dealing29 with. They picked up a hint the virus might come from dogs. But that hypothesis didn't make sense at the time, says virologist Anastasia Vlasova, who's a world expert on coronaviruses and has a specialized30 lab devoted31 to studying them at Ohio State University. "Dog and cat coronaviruses were not thought to infect people," Vlasova says.

Nevertheless, Gray sent Vlasova eight of the patients' samples, including the 5-month-old baby's. Vlasova went to work, trying to figure out if indeed these patients had caught a new coronavirus.

Vlasova took a little bit of each sample and added it to a broth32 that contains dog cells. If indeed a dog virus infected their respiratory tracts, then the virus should be able to infect these cells and grow in the broth.

After three days, Vlasova checked the cells. She saw no signs of virus in any of them, except for one: that little baby. "Luckily, the virus grew very well," she says. The virus quickly multiplied inside the dog cells.

Now, with a bunch of virus particles at hand, she could finally figure out exactly what was inside the child's respiratory tract by sequencing the virus's genes33. She found that indeed he had caught a dog coronavirus that scientists had never seen before.

The virus had another surprise, she says: Its genes suggested it could have come from pigs or cats as well. "We were able to see the evidence that the virus exchanged parts of its genome, in the past, with some feline34 and pig coronaviruses." (No one knows exactly how the baby was infected in 2017; his family does not keep pet dogs.)

Those findings were striking and suggested that the infant was likely the first known case of the seventh coronavirus known to infect people. But he wasn't the only one — not in the least.

Unbeknownst to Vlasova, another virologist 900 miles away was working to solve the exact same coronavirus puzzle. But the person infected wasn't in Malaysia. He lived in Florida.

Meanwhile, in Florida ...

In 2017, while Toh was collecting nasal swabs from people with pneumonia in Sarawak, Malaysia, John Lednicky at the University of Florida was looking for Zika virus in Floridians who had just returned home from traveling. One person, back from a trip to Haiti, had a scratchy throat and fever. Lednicky had stumbled upon the same dog coronavirus that was found inside the little boy.

And so, this new dog coronavirus, which scientists had thought couldn't jump into people, had spilled over both in Malaysia and 12,000 miles away in Haiti.

But its spillovers didn't stop there.

An analysis this past summer found that scientists had actually detected the dog virus two other times before inside sick people. In 2007, Thai scientists identified the dog virus in 8 of 226, or 3.5%, of children tested with respiratory infections. (At the time, the scientists mistakenly identified this virus as another coronavirus known to cause the common cold.) In Arizona, scientists found this dog-linked coronavirus in about 1.5% of people who had flu-like symptoms but tested negative for the flu.

"These spillover events [of the dog coronavirus] are likely happening all the time," says Gray at UTMB. "Unless you have the right tools, such as the diagnostics we have here, you wouldn't know about it."

A case in point: the recent studies from John Lednicky and his colleagues. In the past few years, they not only detected a new dog coronavirus inside a person, they also uncovered a pig coronavirus in not one, but three sick children in Haiti. And just like Gray and Toh, they found the virus quite easily.

"We were just looking at a random35 sample of children from Haiti — a very small sample at that — and we just casually36 found two spillover events," says Marco Salemi at the University of Florida, who helped lead the study. "If these spillover events were extremely or exceedingly rare, we would not have seen that."

In 2014 and 2015, Salemi and his colleagues collected blood samples from about 350 schoolkids in Gressier, Haiti, who fell ill for an unknown reason. They had fevers but never tested positive for known pathogens.

In three of the children, or nearly 1% of those tested, Salemi and his colleagues detected pig coronavirus, which normally attacks the intestines37 of the animals.

As with the dog coronavirus, scientists thought this virus couldn't infect people, Salemi says. "But in fact, while evolving in pigs, some of these viral strains acquired extra mutations that made the virus capable of replicating38 efficiently39 in human cells."

In their study, which appeared in Nature in November 2021, Salemi and his colleagues documented at least two spillovers from pigs into the Haitian children. But he suspects there were many, many more, given how easily they identified these two.

"Just to be clear, that's my guess," he says of the possibility of additional spillovers. "But considering that we weren't even looking for this virus and we casually found two spillover events, I think that there were probably many more."

Over in Kenya, an epidemiologist recently came to the same conclusion about another coronavirus: MERS. The virus circulates in camels and has infected herds40 repeatedly. Since doctors first detected MERS in people in 2012, the thinking has been that it rarely jumps into humans. But when Isaac Ngere of Washington State University in Nairobi, Kenya, took a closer look — and actually tried to detect MERS spillovers in people — he easily found them.

"Our study was unique because we followed these camels for two years, seeing them every week and also visiting the people who take care of them," Ngere says.

Throughout the study, many camels caught MERS. "There were a lot of camels coughing and having discharge from their mouths, eyes and nose," Ngere explains. "At the same time, quite a number of people who had been in contact with those camels also had symptoms of respiratory illness."

Indeed, Ngere and his team detected MERS virus inside three people who handle camels or in the handlers' relatives. At least 75% of these people had signs of previous MERS infections, the team found.

"So if you are handling camels in Kenya, you're at high risk of becoming infected," Ngere says. "And if you're older or have an underlying41 disease, like diabetes42 or hypertension, then you may be at high risk of having symptoms and possible severe disease."

Altogether, these clusters of studies paint a clear and striking picture of spillovers: Spillovers aren't like needles in a haystack. They're more like a rake sticking out of the side of the haystack. Once you start looking, you find them — everywhere. The barriers for some animal viruses to jump into humans are likely much lower than previously thought.

"I don't think spillovers are extremely rare because when people actually started looking for spillovers, they found them," says Goldstein, at the University of Utah. And they didn't just find them, they found them easily.

In fact, right now in the world, there's a group of animal viruses that are likely jumping into people every day, perhaps several times a day.

One study, published in August, estimated that more than 60,000 SARS-like viruses spill over from bats into people each year in Southeast Asia alone. "Like snowflakes during a nice winter snow, spillovers are trickling43 across our population every day," says Peter Daszak, who's president of the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance and led the study.

"In any environment, even in our homes, every time we take a breath, we breathe in probably thousands of different bacterial44 and virus strains," says Salemi at the University of Florida. "We catch viruses by touching45 surfaces, by breathing, by petting our pets. Animal viruses are everywhere."

When I first heard Salemi say this — and read all of the studies with spillovers popping up easily — I have to admit it freaked me out a bit. I would hug my dog at night and imagine all of the dog coronaviruses flowing from her breath. Did a dog virus just spill over from her to me? What about my mom's cat or the neighbors' chickens I held the other day? Every animal seemed to be teeming46 with new viruses.

On top of that, if spillovers aren't rare, then why don't we have more outbreaks and pandemics? What's holding these viruses back?

But over the course of reporting this story, my view of spillovers switched 180 degrees.

First off, the vast majority of these spillovers don't harm anyone, Salemi says. Most people's immune systems fight off the pathogen without having symptoms at all. When a virus does trigger symptoms, the illness masquerades as a cold, flu or stomach bug47.

On top of that, the virus rarely spreads to another person, or only to a few people. Outbreaks are small.

"The virus jumps into humans, infects a few people, and then the pathogen essentially48 does not have the capacity to really infect a large number of people," Salemi says. That's because the animal viruses, in the vast majority of cases, aren't adapted to live in humans or jump between us, he says.

Second, I began to realize that frequent spillovers may actually help scientists stop the next pandemic, and illnesses like the Malaysian infant's are central to this new strategy.

When I visited Malaysia in the fall to talk to the mother about her son's devastating49 illness, I was anxious to see how the child was doing — and to meet the boy. During our chat, a little boy wearing a Cookie Monster T-shirt walked shyly out of a bedroom, then hid behind his mother. She introduced him to me and said, "He is 5 years old now."

She told me that her baby spent five days in the ICU. "Then he took months to recover," she says. Similar to people with long COVID, he experienced shortness of breath, on and off, for two years. And he is small for his age.

"But now he is healthy and in kindergarten," she says, as he takes his mom's phone from her lap and starts playing a video game.

Despite all their pain and suffering, the mother says she is proud to have helped scientists, in some small way, identify this new coronavirus. But her baby's illness did more than that. It also helped point scientists to a more efficient and easier way to find potentially dangerous viruses.

To learn about this approach firsthand, I traveled inland about 150 miles from her house to the town of Kapit. Nestled between a river as wide as the great Mississippi and the mountains of lush Borneo rainforest, Kapit is a vibrant50 town filled with colorful buildings painted lime, pink and pale yellow.

In an open-air market, you can find freshwater fish, black olives, red star fruit and wild deer. Up on a hillside, inside a five-story building, you can find a glimpse of the future — the future of pandemic surveillance.

The building contains the town's hospital. Inside, Dr. Toh is busy at the pediatric ward51, discussing patients with several of the hospital's doctors. They are currently caring for about a dozen children and babies who are sick with pneumonia and respiratory infections. Many of these children are struggling to breathe and absorb enough oxygen, Toh says.

Each year, this tiny hospital saves the lives of hundreds of kids with these types of infections. But it's part of a global mission as well. It's the site of an innovative52 project trying to detect the next dangerous coronavirus before it spreads around the world.

What scientists don't always realize, says Dr. Gray at UTMB, is that viruses don't jump from an animal into people and then trigger a pandemic right away. "It takes time — many years — for pathogens to adapt to humans," he says.

A virus needs to spill over many, many times before it evolves the ability to have transmission between people, he explains. "And then only rarely, over long time periods, does a pathogen become highly efficient in transmission," Gray adds. And that's when it becomes a global problem like SARS-CoV-2.

"So if we focus on pathogens that are beginning to take hold in people, such as the dog coronavirus that infected the 5-month-old in 2017, we're not looking at every animal for every possible pathogen. And we can catch these spillover viruses before they fully53 adapt and become highly transmissible," he says.

That approach would be much less expensive, he says. But that's not the sole advantage. It also gives the world time to study these new pathogens and prepare tests, treatments and even vaccines54.

In Kapit, Toh explains how this alternative approach to new virus hunting works on a practical level.

In one small room of the hospital, he says, there's a little boy about 4 or 5 years old lying still in a crib. He's shirtless. Toh can see his chest rise and fall quickly. "He's breathing very rapidly," Toh tells me. Doctors tested him with a panel of known viruses and bacteria, but nothing has come back positive.

"We don't know what he has," Toh says. "And so I said to the team of doctors, 'Take a sample from his nose. Send it to Sibu Hospital and see what might be there' " — what new coronaviruses might be there.


点击收听单词发音收听单词发音  

1 thwart wIRzZ     
v.阻挠,妨碍,反对;adj.横(断的)
参考例句:
  • We must thwart his malevolent schemes.我们决不能让他的恶毒阴谋得逞。
  • I don't think that will thwart our purposes.我认为那不会使我们的目的受到挫折。
2 transcript JgpzUp     
n.抄本,誊本,副本,肄业证书
参考例句:
  • A transcript of the tapes was presented as evidence in court.一份录音带的文字本作为证据被呈交法庭。
  • They wouldn't let me have a transcript of the interview.他们拒绝给我一份采访的文字整理稿。
3 stilts 1d1f7db881198e2996ecb9fc81dc39e5     
n.(支撑建筑物高出地面或水面的)桩子,支柱( stilt的名词复数 );高跷
参考例句:
  • a circus performer on stilts 马戏团里踩高跷的演员
  • The bamboo huts here are all built on stilts. 这里的竹楼都是架空的。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》
4 maze F76ze     
n.迷宫,八阵图,混乱,迷惑
参考例句:
  • He found his way through the complex maze of corridors.他穿过了迷宮一样的走廊。
  • She was lost in the maze for several hours.一连几小时,她的头脑处于一片糊涂状态。
5 piers 97df53049c0dee20e54484371e5e225c     
n.水上平台( pier的名词复数 );(常设有娱乐场所的)突堤;柱子;墙墩
参考例句:
  • Most road bridges have piers rising out of the vally. 很多公路桥的桥墩是从河谷里建造起来的。 来自辞典例句
  • At these piers coasters and landing-craft would be able to discharge at all states of tide. 沿岸航行的海船和登陆艇,不论潮汐如何涨落,都能在这种码头上卸载。 来自辞典例句
6 stigma WG2z4     
n.耻辱,污名;(花的)柱头
参考例句:
  • Being an unmarried mother used to carry a social stigma.做未婚母亲在社会上曾是不光彩的事。
  • The stigma of losing weighed heavily on the team.失败的耻辱让整个队伍压力沉重。
7 feverish gzsye     
adj.发烧的,狂热的,兴奋的
参考例句:
  • He is too feverish to rest.他兴奋得安静不下来。
  • They worked with feverish haste to finish the job.为了完成此事他们以狂热的速度工作着。
8 deteriorated a4fe98b02a18d2ca4fe500863af93815     
恶化,变坏( deteriorate的过去式和过去分词 )
参考例句:
  • Her health deteriorated rapidly, and she died shortly afterwards. 她的健康状况急剧恶化,不久便去世了。
  • His condition steadily deteriorated. 他的病情恶化,日甚一日。
9 pneumonia s2HzQ     
n.肺炎
参考例句:
  • Cage was struck with pneumonia in her youth.凯奇年轻时得过肺炎。
  • Pneumonia carried him off last week.肺炎上星期夺去了他的生命。
10 bacterium BN7zE     
n.(pl.)bacteria 细菌
参考例句:
  • The bacterium possibly goes in the human body by the mouth.细菌可能通过口进入人体。
  • A bacterium is identified as the cause for his duodenal ulcer.一种细菌被断定为造成他十二指肠溃疡的根源。
11 foresight Wi3xm     
n.先见之明,深谋远虑
参考例句:
  • The failure is the result of our lack of foresight.这次失败是由于我们缺乏远虑而造成的。
  • It required a statesman's foresight and sagacity to make the decision.作出这个决定需要政治家的远见卓识。
12 kits e16d4ffa0f9467cd8d2db7d706f0a7a5     
衣物和装备( kit的名词复数 ); 成套用品; 配套元件
参考例句:
  • Keep your kits closed and locked when not in use. 不用的话把你的装备都锁好放好。
  • Gifts Articles, Toy and Games, Wooden Toys, Puzzles, Craft Kits. 采购产品礼品,玩具和游戏,木制的玩具,智力玩具,手艺装备。
13 tract iJxz4     
n.传单,小册子,大片(土地或森林)
参考例句:
  • He owns a large tract of forest.他拥有一大片森林。
  • He wrote a tract on this subject.他曾对此写了一篇短文。
14 genetic PgIxp     
adj.遗传的,遗传学的
参考例句:
  • It's very difficult to treat genetic diseases.遗传性疾病治疗起来很困难。
  • Each daughter cell can receive a full complement of the genetic information.每个子细胞可以收到遗传信息的一个完全补偿物。
15 lottery 43MyV     
n.抽彩;碰运气的事,难于算计的事
参考例句:
  • He won no less than £5000 in the lottery.他居然中了5000英镑的奖券。
  • They thought themselves lucky in the lottery of life.他们认为自己是变幻莫测的人生中的幸运者。
16 remarkably EkPzTW     
ad.不同寻常地,相当地
参考例句:
  • I thought she was remarkably restrained in the circumstances. 我认为她在那种情况下非常克制。
  • He made a remarkably swift recovery. 他康复得相当快。
17 rodents 1ff5f0f12f2930e77fb620b1471a2124     
n.啮齿目动物( rodent的名词复数 )
参考例句:
  • Rodents carry diseases and are generally regarded as pests. 啮齿目动物传播疾病,常被当作害虫对待。 来自《简明英汉词典》
  • Some wild rodents in Africa also harbor the virus. 在非洲,有些野生啮齿动物也是储毒者。 来自辞典例句
18 costly 7zXxh     
adj.昂贵的,价值高的,豪华的
参考例句:
  • It must be very costly to keep up a house like this.维修这么一幢房子一定很昂贵。
  • This dictionary is very useful,only it is a bit costly.这本词典很有用,左不过贵了些。
19 blatantly rxkztU     
ad.公开地
参考例句:
  • Safety guidelines had been blatantly ignored. 安全规章被公然置之不顾。
  • They walked grandly through the lobby, blatantly arm in arm, pretending they were not defeated. 他们大大方方地穿过门厅,故意炫耀地挎着胳膊,假装他们没有被打败。
20 evolutionary Ctqz7m     
adj.进化的;演化的,演变的;[生]进化论的
参考例句:
  • Life has its own evolutionary process.生命有其自身的进化过程。
  • These are fascinating questions to be resolved by the evolutionary studies of plants.这些十分吸引人的问题将在研究植物进化过程中得以解决。
21 decided lvqzZd     
adj.决定了的,坚决的;明显的,明确的
参考例句:
  • This gave them a decided advantage over their opponents.这使他们比对手具有明显的优势。
  • There is a decided difference between British and Chinese way of greeting.英国人和中国人打招呼的方式有很明显的区别。
22 investigation MRKzq     
n.调查,调查研究
参考例句:
  • In an investigation,a new fact became known, which told against him.在调查中新发现了一件对他不利的事实。
  • He drew the conclusion by building on his own investigation.他根据自己的调查研究作出结论。
23 tracts fcea36d422dccf9d9420a7dd83bea091     
大片土地( tract的名词复数 ); 地带; (体内的)道; (尤指宣扬宗教、伦理或政治的)短文
参考例句:
  • vast tracts of forest 大片大片的森林
  • There are tracts of desert in Australia. 澳大利亚有大片沙漠。
24 assay 1ODyx     
n.试验,测定
参考例句:
  • The assay result of that material is rich in iron.化验结果表明那种物质含铁量丰富。
  • The ore assay 75 percent of gold.这种矿石经分析证明含金百分之七十五。
25 previously bkzzzC     
adv.以前,先前(地)
参考例句:
  • The bicycle tyre blew out at a previously damaged point.自行车胎在以前损坏过的地方又爆开了。
  • Let me digress for a moment and explain what had happened previously.让我岔开一会儿,解释原先发生了什么。
26 remarkable 8Vbx6     
adj.显著的,异常的,非凡的,值得注意的
参考例句:
  • She has made remarkable headway in her writing skills.她在写作技巧方面有了长足进步。
  • These cars are remarkable for the quietness of their engines.这些汽车因发动机没有噪音而不同凡响。
27 relatively bkqzS3     
adv.比较...地,相对地
参考例句:
  • The rabbit is a relatively recent introduction in Australia.兔子是相对较新引入澳大利亚的物种。
  • The operation was relatively painless.手术相对来说不痛。
28 initially 273xZ     
adv.最初,开始
参考例句:
  • The ban was initially opposed by the US.这一禁令首先遭到美国的反对。
  • Feathers initially developed from insect scales.羽毛最初由昆虫的翅瓣演化而来。
29 dealing NvjzWP     
n.经商方法,待人态度
参考例句:
  • This store has an excellent reputation for fair dealing.该商店因买卖公道而享有极高的声誉。
  • His fair dealing earned our confidence.他的诚实的行为获得我们的信任。
30 specialized Chuzwe     
adj.专门的,专业化的
参考例句:
  • There are many specialized agencies in the United Nations.联合国有许多专门机构。
  • These tools are very specialized.这些是专用工具。
31 devoted xu9zka     
adj.忠诚的,忠实的,热心的,献身于...的
参考例句:
  • He devoted his life to the educational cause of the motherland.他为祖国的教育事业贡献了一生。
  • We devoted a lengthy and full discussion to this topic.我们对这个题目进行了长时间的充分讨论。
32 broth acsyx     
n.原(汁)汤(鱼汤、肉汤、菜汤等)
参考例句:
  • Every cook praises his own broth.厨子总是称赞自己做的汤。
  • Just a bit of a mouse's dropping will spoil a whole saucepan of broth.一粒老鼠屎败坏一锅汤。
33 genes 01914f8eac35d7e14afa065217edd8c0     
n.基因( gene的名词复数 )
参考例句:
  • You have good genes from your parents, so you should live a long time. 你从父母那儿获得优良的基因,所以能够活得很长。 来自《简明英汉词典》
  • Differences will help to reveal the functions of the genes. 它们间的差异将会帮助我们揭开基因多种功能。 来自英汉非文学 - 生命科学 - 生物技术的世纪
34 feline nkdxi     
adj.猫科的
参考例句:
  • As a result,humans have learned to respect feline independence.结果是人们已经学会尊重猫的独立性。
  • The awakening was almost feline in its stealthiness.这种醒觉,简直和猫的脚步一样地轻悄。
35 random HT9xd     
adj.随机的;任意的;n.偶然的(或随便的)行动
参考例句:
  • The list is arranged in a random order.名单排列不分先后。
  • On random inspection the meat was found to be bad.经抽查,发现肉变质了。
36 casually UwBzvw     
adv.漠不关心地,无动于衷地,不负责任地
参考例句:
  • She remarked casually that she was changing her job.她当时漫不经心地说要换工作。
  • I casually mentioned that I might be interested in working abroad.我不经意地提到我可能会对出国工作感兴趣。
37 intestines e809cc608db249eaf1b13d564503dbca     
n.肠( intestine的名词复数 )
参考例句:
  • Perhaps the most serious problems occur in the stomach and intestines. 最严重的问题或许出现在胃和肠里。 来自辞典例句
  • The traps of carnivorous plants function a little like the stomachs and small intestines of animals. 食肉植物的捕蝇器起着动物的胃和小肠的作用。 来自辞典例句
38 replicating f99e0d57427bf581c14df13d1256bc97     
复制( replicate的现在分词 ); 重复; 再造; 再生
参考例句:
  • Applications create these partitions for storing and replicating data. 应用程序创建这些分区用来储存和复制数据。
  • The closest real things to these creatures were bits of self-replicating RNA. 最贴近这些造物的实物是能做一点微不足道的自复制的核糖核酸。
39 efficiently ZuTzXQ     
adv.高效率地,有能力地
参考例句:
  • The worker oils the machine to operate it more efficiently.工人给机器上油以使机器运转更有效。
  • Local authorities have to learn to allocate resources efficiently.地方政府必须学会有效地分配资源。
40 herds 0a162615f6eafc3312659a54a8cdac0f     
兽群( herd的名词复数 ); 牧群; 人群; 群众
参考例句:
  • Regularly at daybreak they drive their herds to the pasture. 每天天一亮他们就把牲畜赶到草场上去。
  • There we saw herds of cows grazing on the pasture. 我们在那里看到一群群的牛在草地上吃草。
41 underlying 5fyz8c     
adj.在下面的,含蓄的,潜在的
参考例句:
  • The underlying theme of the novel is very serious.小说隐含的主题是十分严肃的。
  • This word has its underlying meaning.这个单词有它潜在的含义。
42 diabetes uPnzu     
n.糖尿病
参考例句:
  • In case of diabetes, physicians advise against the use of sugar.对于糖尿病患者,医生告诫他们不要吃糖。
  • Diabetes is caused by a fault in the insulin production of the body.糖尿病是由体內胰岛素分泌失调引起的。
43 trickling 24aeffc8684b1cc6b8fa417e730cc8dc     
n.油画底色含油太多而成泡沫状突起v.滴( trickle的现在分词 );淌;使)慢慢走;缓慢移动
参考例句:
  • Tears were trickling down her cheeks. 眼泪顺着她的面颊流了下来。
  • The engine was trickling oil. 发动机在滴油。 来自《简明英汉词典》
44 bacterial dy5z8q     
a.细菌的
参考例句:
  • Bacterial reproduction is accelerated in weightless space. 在失重的空间,细菌繁殖加快了。
  • Brain lesions can be caused by bacterial infections. 大脑损伤可能由细菌感染引起。
45 touching sg6zQ9     
adj.动人的,使人感伤的
参考例句:
  • It was a touching sight.这是一幅动人的景象。
  • His letter was touching.他的信很感人。
46 teeming 855ef2b5bd20950d32245ec965891e4a     
adj.丰富的v.充满( teem的现在分词 );到处都是;(指水、雨等)暴降;倾注
参考例句:
  • The rain was teeming down. 大雨倾盆而下。
  • the teeming streets of the city 熙熙攘攘的城市街道
47 bug 5skzf     
n.虫子;故障;窃听器;vt.纠缠;装窃听器
参考例句:
  • There is a bug in the system.系统出了故障。
  • The bird caught a bug on the fly.那鸟在飞行中捉住了一只昆虫。
48 essentially nntxw     
adv.本质上,实质上,基本上
参考例句:
  • Really great men are essentially modest.真正的伟人大都很谦虚。
  • She is an essentially selfish person.她本质上是个自私自利的人。
49 devastating muOzlG     
adj.毁灭性的,令人震惊的,强有力的
参考例句:
  • It is the most devastating storm in 20 years.这是20年来破坏性最大的风暴。
  • Affairs do have a devastating effect on marriages.婚外情确实会对婚姻造成毁灭性的影响。
50 vibrant CL5zc     
adj.震颤的,响亮的,充满活力的,精力充沛的,(色彩)鲜明的
参考例句:
  • He always uses vibrant colours in his paintings. 他在画中总是使用鲜明的色彩。
  • She gave a vibrant performance in the leading role in the school play.她在学校表演中生气盎然地扮演了主角。
51 ward LhbwY     
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
参考例句:
  • The hospital has a medical ward and a surgical ward.这家医院有内科病房和外科病房。
  • During the evening picnic,I'll carry a torch to ward off the bugs.傍晚野餐时,我要点根火把,抵挡蚊虫。
52 innovative D6Vxq     
adj.革新的,新颖的,富有革新精神的
参考例句:
  • Discover an innovative way of marketing.发现一个创新的营销方式。
  • He was one of the most creative and innovative engineers of his generation.他是他那代人当中最富创造性与革新精神的工程师之一。
53 fully Gfuzd     
adv.完全地,全部地,彻底地;充分地
参考例句:
  • The doctor asked me to breathe in,then to breathe out fully.医生让我先吸气,然后全部呼出。
  • They soon became fully integrated into the local community.他们很快就完全融入了当地人的圈子。
54 vaccines c9bb57973a82c1e95c7cd0f4988a1ded     
疫苗,痘苗( vaccine的名词复数 )
参考例句:
  • His team are at the forefront of scientific research into vaccines. 他的小组处于疫苗科研的最前沿。
  • The vaccines were kept cool in refrigerators. 疫苗放在冰箱中冷藏。
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