VOA慢速英语:WHO Urges Ban on Blood Test for Tuberculosis

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The World Health Organization is urging health officials to ban commonly-available blood tests for tuberculosis. W.H.O. officials made the call after two studies found that results from a commonly used test are undependable and misleading.
世界卫生组织敦促卫生官员禁止正在普遍使用的验血检测肺结核的方法。在经过两项研究之后发现普遍使用的验血方法不可靠，并且具有误导性，W.H.O.官员发出了该呼吁。

The blood tests are low-cost and produce fast results. They are widely used in developing countries, especially India. The Indian government says the country has more than two million new cases of TB a year.
验血成本比较低，而且能快速得到结果。它们被广泛应用于发展中国家，特别是印度。印度政府称，印度每年有超过200万新增肺结核病例。

But, researchers say the tests being sold are dangerously inaccurate. They say the results are wrong in fifty percent of patients.
但是，研究人员称，当前正在使用检测方法是非常不准确的。他们说，有50%的病人的检测结果是错误的。

David Dowdy studies infectious diseases at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland. He led one of the studies.
David Dowdy在马里兰州巴尔的摩约翰．霍普金斯大学布隆博格公共卫生学院研究传染性疾病。他负责其中一项研究。

DAVID DOWDY: “These tests are actively doing people harm by causing them either to take medicines that they don’t need or delaying the diagnosis that they actually do need, to get better.”
DAVID DOWDY：“这些检测对人们造成了很大的害处，致使他们服用了本不需要的药物，或者延误了原本需要的诊断和治疗。”

Traditional tests for TB examine the sputum, a material found in a person’s lungs. Active TB is identified if certain bacterium grows in the test material. However, these tests take longer to carry out. Dr. Dowdy says the blood tests are widely used because of the speed of results.
传统的肺结核检测方法检验病人肺部的痰液。如果检测物质中的某种细菌生长，表明感染了结核病。然而，这种检测需要花费很长时间。Dowdy医生称，血液检测被如此广泛使用的原因是出结果的速度快。

DAVID DOWDY: “What these tests do is they measure antibodies in the blood against TB so anytime anyone has been infected with TB at any time in their life, they will develop antibodies. The problem is that one person’s antibodies are not going to be the same as another person’s antibodies. And we don’t have a test yet that can detect these antibodies across the board.”
DAVID DOWDY：“这种检测方法是通过检测血液中的结核病抗体来确认的，任何人在他们一生中任何时候感染过结核病菌，其体内都会产生抗体。问题是，每个病人的抗体并不都一样。并且我们目前的检测方法并不能检测出所有抗体。”

The leader of the other study was Madhukar Pai, an epidemiologist at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He says the tests are usually used by private medical centers -- not government TB control programs.
另一项研究的负责人是加拿大蒙特利尔麦吉尔大学流行病学家Madhukar Pai。他表示，这种检测方法通常被用于私人医疗中心，而不是政府的结核病控制项目。

MADHUKAR PAI: “So these tests are uniformly not used in the developed world. They are mostly used in countries with weak regulation, and lack of regulation allows these sorts of tests to be on the market and used freely.”
Madhukar Pai：“因此，这些检测方法在发达国家并不使用。大部分是在调控管理比较薄弱的国家，缺乏监管会导致这些检测方法在市场上随意使用。”

Experts say the blood tests are a big business in developing countries, worth millions of dollars a year. The World Health Organization says a million of the tests are done every year. But, the tests are not approved by any recognized supervisory group.
专家称血液检测在发展中国家是一项每年数百万美元收入的大生意。世界卫生组织称，每年共有100万人次接受血液检测。但是，没有任何公认的监督机构有批准这种检测方法。

Dr. Pai also says the WHO is pushing scientists to continue research for a quick test.
Pai医生还说到，WHO敦促科学家继续研究一种快速检测方法。

MADHUKAR PAI: “[Be]cause someday we want a simple dipstick-like test for TB, as we have for HIV and malaria. But right now we don’t have such a test for TB for point of care use.”
Madhukar Pai：“因为我们希望一天能有一种像量试纸一样简单的结核检测方法，就像HIV和疟疾一样。但是现在，肺结核并没有这种检测方法。”