美国国家公共电台 NPR A Taste For Pork Helped A Deadly Virus Jump To Humans

 

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

When you talk to disease experts about what might alarm them, it's not Ebola or Zika. It's Nipah. It's as deadly as Ebola but attacks the brain, and it has the potential to spread by mere¹ cough. As NPR's Michaeleen Doucleff reports, Nipah originated in Malaysia - the unintended consequence of that country's efforts to lift itself from poverty. A warning, this story includes some graphic² descriptions.

MICHAELEEN DOUCLEFF, BYLINE³: This story begins in a small farming town called, Nipah. It's where the virus gets its name. It's about an hour drive south of Malaysia's capital, Kuala Lumpur.

So I'm riding with Thomas Wong who was a pig farmer here 20 years ago.

THOMAS WONG: (Foreign Language Spoken).

DOUCLEFF: He says everyone in Nipah was a pig farmer because Nipah was at the center of Asia's booming pork industry. The region was going through a huge economic surge. Families now had enough money to buy pork for lunch and dinner. So pig farmers were getting rich.

How many pigs were in this area?

WONG: About half a million.

DOUCLEFF: Half a million pigs - wow.

WONG: Yes. Very densely⁴ populated.

DOUCLEFF: Very densely populated. And they're all gone now?

WONG: Oh, no. All buried.

DOUCLEFF: All buried, all underground because back in 1998 something went terribly wrong here. Wong pulls up to an abandoned farm.

So maybe you can take us through what happened? So the disease came to this farm here?

WONG: Yeah. The pigs...

DOUCLEFF: He says, first, baby pigs started getting sick. They'd get a cough, couldn't walk. Then they'd died. There were so many dead piglets that their bodies piled up around the town, and the town smelled like death.

WONG: Oh, the smell - dead like dead rats.

DOUCLEFF: Then the situation got worse. People started dying.

WONG: Every day we'd see the newspaper that people dying.

DOUCLEFF: Did you lose any family or friends?

WONG: Friends, yes - lots of friends.

DOUCLEFF: The disease struck lightning fast. Dr. C. T. Tan is a neurologist who took care of patients from Nipah. He said farmers were healthy one day, and then their brain swelled⁵ up. They couldn't walk or talk.

TAN CHONG TIN: They'd become comatose⁶. And some of them become paralyzed.

DOUCLEFF: And then...

TAN: After two, three days, they'd die.

DOUCLEFF: There was nothing Tan could do - no cure, no treatment.

TAN: We thought it was some unusual infection, but we didn't know what it was.

DOUCLEFF: And time was running out. Dozens of people had already died in Malaysia, and the disease had spread to Singapore.

WONG: That was frightening.

DOUCLEFF: Yet the Malaysian government told people not to worry - that the disease was coming from mosquitoes, and they were taking care of it by spraying. But one young scientist - he thought the government was wrong.

OK. We're here.

His name is Kaw Bing Chua. I met him at the farm where the outbreak began. He was ordered to test blood samples for the mosquito virus. Those samples kept coming back negative.

KAW BING CHUA: No, no. I know it was something different, and people dying.

DOUCLEFF: Chua thought it might be a new virus, one that the world had never seen before. But to prove it, he had to do something very dangerous. He had to grow the virus in his lab without proper safety measures. Putting himself and his lab at risk so he could study it. He worked late into the night for weeks, said a little prayer before each experiment. Then one Friday evening, he opened up one of his petri dishes, and there it was.

CHUA: I actually saw initially⁷ the cell membranes⁸ thickening.

DOUCLEFF: You could see the virus actually coming out of the cell.

CHUA: Yes.

DOUCLEFF: And that means you had found what was making them sick.

CHUA: Yes, yes.

DOUCLEFF: What did you feel like?

CHUA: Of course, very fearful.

DOUCLEFF: Very fearful?

CHUA: Yes.

DOUCLEFF: The virus looked ruthless, destroying every human cell he tested. It grew like gang busters. In just a few weeks, he had grown enough to wipe out a whole town. He called his boss over to show him.

CHUA: I said, please come. I want to show you something. When he looked under the microscope...

DOUCLEFF: He didn't believe the results. He told Chua to throw away the experiment. But Chua didn't throw it away. Instead, he took it to the U.S.

CHUA: It was an emergency, actually.

DOUCLEFF: It's an emergency. You had to get it there quickly.

CHUA: Yes.

DOUCLEFF: Did you just carry it with you?

CHUA: Yes. Of course, with special packing.

DOUCLEFF: That's right. Wrapped the samples carefully, put them in his carry-on luggage and boarded a plane to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC had a special microscope that they could identify exactly what the virus was. Chua will never forget what he saw.

CHUA: The moment I saw the thing, I said, goodness.

DOUCLEFF: You said, goodness?

CHUA: Yes. It's paramyxo.

DOUCLEFF: A paramyxo virus. These viruses come from livestock⁹, not mosquitoes. Scientists think the next pandemic will be caused by a virus like this - highly lethal¹⁰ and the potential to be super contagious¹¹.

Chua rushed to a phone, called up officials in Malaysia and told them, stop fighting mosquitoes. It's coming from the pigs. Finally, the Malaysian government listened and did something very drastic.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

TIM LESTER: Malaysia's army moved in for the country's biggest-ever animal culling¹².

(SOUNDBITE OF PIGS SQUEALING)

LESTER: Almost one million pigs.

(SOUNDBITE OF GUNSHOTS)

DOUCLEFF: That's tape from Journeymen Pictures which reported on the outbreak back in 1999. The results of the culling were dramatic. The outbreak stopped - dead stopped. As Chua is telling me all this, he starts to choke up.

CHUA: No one believed me. Practically begging people to believe - nobody believed me.

DOUCLEFF: It's an amazing story, Dr. Chua. I mean, it's amazing. Your persistence¹³ is why this outbreak stopped.

CHUA: (Crying) Let me cool down.

DOUCLEFF: OK.

Chua had saved many lives, but the world was still stuck with a mystery. Why did the pigs get sick? It turned out that the pigs had been getting the disease for years undetected. Dr. Tan, the doctor treating Nipah patients, was studying this.

TAN: In the old days, the pigs were running around, and the family would look after a few pigs.

DOUCLEFF: A few pigs would get sick, but no one was bothered. It just looked like the flu. But in the past few decades, farmers in Asia had changed the way they raised pigs. They were packing more pigs into farms, starting to industrialize them.

TAN: So it also means that when the virus get to the pigs, it can also multiply very quickly.

DOUCLEFF: When you have thousands and thousands of pigs, not 10, there's a seemingly endless supply of new piglets to infect. The pig factory becomes a virus factory. The virus was spreading through coughs from one farm to the next and eventually into farmers.

TAN: The way we grow our food - it changes.

DOUCLEFF: So agricultural intensification¹⁴ was part of the trigger?

TAN: Yes.

DOUCLEFF: And that's something we don't think about. As people get richer, there could be this devastating¹⁵ consequence. In this case, factory farming, which feeds more people, inadvertently created the Nipah outbreak. And you see this around the world. With cows in the U.S., you get new types of MRSA, a flesh-eating bacteria. With chickens in China - a whole slew¹⁶ of bird flu.

TAN: The world is changing so fast.

DOUCLEFF: In Malaysia, pig farms have gotten cleaner, and Nipah has stayed away. But across Asia, there have been more than 16 other outbreaks. And there are signs the virus is evolving, becoming more contagious in people. Michaeleen Doucleff, NPR News.

1 mere   

adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过

参考例句：

• That is a mere repetition of what you said before.那不过是重复了你以前讲的话。
• It's a mere waste of time waiting any longer.再等下去纯粹是浪费时间。

2 graphic   

adj.生动的，形象的，绘画的，文字的，图表的

参考例句：

• The book gave a graphic description of the war.这本书生动地描述了战争的情况。
• Distinguish important text items in lists with graphic icons.用图标来区分重要的文本项。

3 byline   

n.署名；v.署名

参考例句：

• His byline was absent as well.他的署名也不见了。
• We wish to thank the author of this article which carries no byline.我们要感谢这篇文章的那位没有署名的作者。

4 densely   

ad.密集地；浓厚地

参考例句：

• A grove of trees shadowed the house densely. 树丛把这幢房子遮蔽得很密实。
• We passed through miles of densely wooded country. 我们穿过好几英里茂密的林地。

5 swelled   

增强( swell的过去式和过去分词 )； 肿胀； （使）凸出； 充满（激情）

参考例句：

• The infection swelled his hand. 由于感染，他的手肿了起来。
• After the heavy rain the river swelled. 大雨过后，河水猛涨。

6 comatose   

adj.昏睡的，昏迷不醒的

参考例句：

• Those in extreme fear can be put into a comatose type state.那些极端恐惧的人可能会被安放进一种昏迷状态。
• The doctors revived the comatose man.这个医生使这个昏睡的苏醒了。

7 initially   

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。

8 membranes   

n.（动物或植物体内的）薄膜( membrane的名词复数 )；隔膜；（可起防水、防风等作用的）膜状物

参考例句：

• The waste material is placed in cells with permeable membranes. 废液置于有渗透膜的槽中。 来自辞典例句
• The sarcoplasmic reticulum is a system of intracellular membranes. 肌浆网属于细胞内膜系统。 来自辞典例句

9 livestock   

n.家畜，牲畜

参考例句：

• Both men and livestock are flourishing.人畜两旺。
• The heavy rains and flooding killed scores of livestock.暴雨和大水淹死了许多牲口。

10 lethal   

adj.致死的；毁灭性的

参考例句：

• A hammer can be a lethal weapon.铁锤可以是致命的武器。
• She took a lethal amount of poison and died.她服了致命剂量的毒药死了。

11 contagious   

adj.传染性的，有感染力的

参考例句：

• It's a highly contagious infection.这种病极易传染。
• He's got a contagious laugh.他的笑富有感染力。

12 culling   

n.选择，大批物品中剔出劣质货v.挑选，剔除( cull的现在分词 )

参考例句：

• The mathematicians turned to culling periodic solutions. 数学家们转而去挑选周期解。 来自辞典例句
• It took us a week to find you, a week of culling out prejudice and hatred. 我们花了一个星期的时间找到你们，把偏见和憎恨剔除出去。 来自演讲部分

13 persistence   

n.坚持，持续，存留

参考例句：

• The persistence of a cough in his daughter puzzled him.他女儿持续的咳嗽把他难住了。
• He achieved success through dogged persistence.他靠着坚持不懈取得了成功。

14 intensification   

n.激烈化，增强明暗度；加厚

参考例句：

• The intensification of the immunological response represents the body's natural defense. 增强免疫反应代表身体的自然保卫。 来自辞典例句
• Agriculture in the developing nations is not irreversibly committed, to a particular pattern of intensification. 发展中国家的农业并没有完全为某种集约化形式所束缚。 来自辞典例句

15 devastating   

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。

16 slew   

v.（使）旋转；n.大量，许多

参考例句：

• He slewed the car against the side of the building.他的车滑到了大楼的一侧，抵住了。
• They dealt with a slew of other issues.他们处理了大量的其他问题。