(1) The term "poor-quality medicines" is something of a catch-all. It includes "substandards, " medicines that have had inadequa

admin2022-09-29  28

问题     (1) The term "poor-quality medicines" is something of a catch-all. It includes "substandards, " medicines that have had inadequate quality control or that have degraded from improper storage or the passage of time. And it includes falsified medicines—fakes that claim to be what they are not. These may not be made by the manufacturer whose name is on the package, and they may not contain the stated ingredients in the stated quantities.
    (2) Poor-quality medicines might not work. Like those peddled by Peter Gillespie, who was jailed for introducing 72000 packets of falsified medicines into the UK’s distribution system. 25000 packets reached pharmacies and were given to patients. These knockoff tablets were used to treat heart disease, pancreatic cancer and mental illnesses, and had none or only part of the active ingredient they were supposed to contain. This meant that those people’s illnesses were left to take their course.
    (3) Poor-quality medicines can kill you if you take them. As happened with Thomas Rybinski, a 56-year-old autoworker from Tennessee, USA, who got an injection for his back pain. He fell ill and died because the medicine had contaminants that caused fungal meningitis. The batch of medicine, originating in a New England pharmacy with close to no quality control, ended up causing severe infections in nearly 800 people across the USA, killing 64 of them.
    (4) Poor-quality medicines can kill you even if you don’t take them. Antimicrobial drugs (including antibiotics and antivirals) that have too little active ingredient are generally accepted to help disease-causing bugs evolve so that they develop resistance to treatment even with good-quality antimicrobials. And then these bugs spread. Ramanan Laxminarayan is the director of the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy in Washington, DC. He says that with some drugs, like statins or arthritis drugs, the effects of poor quality are confined to those taking them. But with antimicrobials, inappropriate use reduces their effectiveness for everyone else. "If there’s misuse in South Asia, then everyone is affected. It’s a problem that comes up when people act in ways that don’t take into account the effects of what they are doing on everyone else, " he says.
    (5) "It’s really no different from climate change, " says Laxminarayan. "Either in terms of potential global impact, or in the fact that everyone needs to be working together to solve the problem."
    (6) The factors that speed up the development of antimicrobial resistance—high rates of infections, the overuse and misuse of antimicrobials, poor sanitation, poor-quality medicines—are more common in low- and middle-income countries, which means that so is resistance. But microbes know no boundaries, and they travel easily across the world, in foodstuffs being exported and in the bodies of humans. And often, resistant microbes can transfer genetic material to each other to become even more dangerous to humans.
    (7) The result: infections that were simple to cure, gonorrhoea for example, are back with a vengeance. Conditions like tuberculosis and HIV are getting harder to treat. In the future, routine surgery or cancer treatment could become risky. There is a real danger of returning to a time where any one of us, anywhere in the world, could pick up such an infection and find that medicine is powerless to save us from dying. (本文选自 mosaicscience. com)
What’s the main topic of the passage?

选项 A、The great risks of poor-quality medicines.
B、The effective ways to avoid fake drugs.
C、The global threats caused by antimicrobials.
D、The potential factors leading to severe infections.

答案A

解析 主旨题。纵览全文,文章第一段介绍了劣质药品包含的种类;在随后的六段中,作者介绍了劣质药品的危害,并用具体的例子加以说明。由此可知,全文主要是探讨劣质药品带来的巨大危害,故本题答案为A。文中虽然讲了假药的危害,但并未提及避免使用假药的有效方法,故可以排除B;文章第四、五段介绍了劣质抗菌剂造成的全球性威胁,但这是劣质药品带来的危害的一方面,故可以排除C;文章第六段第一句提到了加速耐药性发展的因素,没有提及导致严重感染的潜在因素,故可以排除D。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/kHkK777K
0

随机试题
最新回复(0)