BBC双语新闻讲解:美国的国家寄生虫藏馆_每日听抄训练之BBC

BBC双语新闻讲解:美国的国家寄生虫藏馆

时间：2016-05-25 15:26:24 / 编辑：Abby

　　听力文本

　　You’ve probably heard of people collecting stamps orarts or even antique cars, but what aboutparasites? In 1892, the American governmentestablished a National Parasite Collection to learnmore about diseases affecting livestock. Twentymillion specimens have now been transferred to theSmithsonian National Museum of Natural History for safekeeping. Our correspondent JanotBryan met the new curator at a swamp in Marryland.

　　It’s a little chilly.

　　We are hoping to find some blood suckers to add to the collection using our bare legs as bait.So we just stand here and wait for the leeches to come and latch onto our legs.

　　Well, leeches, they are blood-feeding, will be attracted by movement. So you have to do leechdance. So there is a special technique. You can either do sort of do this a little bit where youdance your knees up and down and create some ripples, you can also do it side to side. Thepurpose is to create lots of ripples in the water so if there’s leeches farther away, they will beattracted to this point.

　　The leech dance looks a bit like the self-conscious jiggling of mid-aged man at a wedding party.Needless to say, the leeches were not impressed. Is that a leech there?

　　Hum, no. No, that’s not a leech. That’s plants.

　　Fortunately, the National Parasite Collection contains some twenty million specimens includingplenty of leeches. So undaunted, we returned to dry land.

　　This is the US National Parasite Collection. It was founded in 1892. It contains mostly intestinalparasites, intestinal worms. It also includes some ticks, fleas and lice and also a few mites.

　　The sheer scale of the collection is quite overwhelming. There is row-upon-row of jars andbottles of pickled parasites. Many are still attached to their unfortunate hosts while others areso small they can only be seen under a microscope. Some of the parasites here can also infecthumans.

　　Many of the specimens collection are from wild life, and so looking back at the specimens andknowing which animals have hosted these parasites in the past, we can make predictions ofwhat may be infecting humans in the future.

　　In fact, sixty percent of all human diseases come from animals. Stephen Higgs is the Presidentof the American Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.

　　A collection like this, it’s a tremendous resource of material.