抵御流感的新方法

New ways to flight the flu

抵御流感的新方法

You go to bed feeling fine. The next morning you're sick with a fever, exhaustion, headache, body aches and more.

晚上睡觉之前你还感觉良好，但是第二天早上醒来后却发现自己病了，发烧、疲劳、浑身疼等等。

You may have influenza, better known as the flu. It's caused by a virus, a tiny bit of genetic material surrounded by a protein. Flu viruses infect the nose, throat and lungs. (If people claim to have "stomach flu," they are mistaken. They really have some other infection.)

此时你可能已经患上流行性感冒，也就是我们通常所说的流感。这种病一般由病毒引起，病毒是一种由蛋白质裹着的遗传物质。这些流感病毒会感染鼻腔，喉咙和肺部。（如果患者觉得自己患了"肠胃感冒"，那他们就错了，事实上他们是患有其他感染）。

Every year, between 5 percent and 20 percent of all Americans come down with the flu. Those numbers come from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in Washington, D.C. Complications send more than 200,000 of these flu victims to the hospital each year. Worse, the flu kills anywhere from 3,000 to 49,000 people annually - and that's just in the United States.

来自美国华盛顿卫生与公共服务部的数据显示在美国每年约有5%-20%人口染上流感，并且其并发症会致使20万以上患者不得不到医院接受治疗。更糟的情况是每年流感都会导致不同地区3000-49000名患者死亡，而这一情况仅仅是在美国。

A widespread outbreak of flu or another infectious disease is called an epidemic. In some years, flu spreads so far and so fast that it causes a worldwide epidemic. This is known as a pandemic. Researchers hope to prevent a pandemic if possible. One tactic: vaccines.

流感广泛爆发或另一种传染病被称为流行病。在某段时间内，流感快速、广泛爆发会引起世界范围内的流行病，叫做流行性疾病。如果可能的话研究者希望阻止它。而他们的首选应对策略是疫苗。

Flu vaccines offer people some immunity. Immunity is the body's ability to resist a particular disease by making proteins called antibodies. A vaccine can give that process a head start. However, no vaccine yet can fight all types, or strains, of flu.

流感疫苗能增强人体免疫力，它是人类通过自身制造抗体蛋白质来抵御特殊疾病必不可少的能力，而疫苗会赋予这一过程一个顺利的开端。但迄今为止还没有一种疫苗能抵抗各种类型的流感。

What's more, notes David Morens, "Flu is not one virus. It's many, many viruses." Morens works at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. As an epidemiologist, he studies the causes, patterns and effects of disease.

就职于美国马里兰州贝塞斯达国立卫生研究所的David Morens补充道：流感不是由一个病毒构成，而是由大量的病毒构成。作为一名流行病学家，他对疾病的起因，发展模式以及所产生的后果进行了研究。