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  3. I should start by saying as clearly as I can that I love antibiotics. Recently I had dinner with a pediatrician friend, and she

I should start by saying as clearly as I can that I love antibiotics. Recently I had dinner with a pediatrician friend, and she

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问题     I should start by saying as clearly as I can that I love antibiotics. Recently I had dinner with a pediatrician friend, and she told me the story of the day’s sickest child. Before she sent the child to the emergency room in an ambulance, she told me, she gave her 50 milligrams per kilogram of ceftriaxone, a powerful antibiotic.
    "You probably saved her life," I said, and my friend nodded: it was possible. Antibiotics represent a huge gift in the struggle against infant and child mortality, a triumph(or actually, many triumphs)of human ingenuity and science over disease and death, since the antibiotic era began back in the fourth and fifth decades of the 20th century.
    But new research is looking at questions about the complex effects of antibiotics—on bacteria, on individual children, and on populations—building on a greatly increased awareness of how powerful antibiotics can be, and how important it is to use them judiciously.
    Over the past 15 years or so, spurred by new realizations—and new fears—about the risks of breeding resistant strains of bacteria, pediatricians in the United States have, as a group, cut back dramatically on prescribing antibiotics in situations where they may not be necessary. Parents, as a group, have become less likely to demand them.
    "It’s actually been a remarkable change in practice from the mid-90s on," said Dr. Jonathan Finkelstein, a pediatrician at Boston Children’s Hospital who studies antibiotic use and antibiotic resistance, "and we did that by physicians and patients recognizing that antibiotics are quite effective, quite safe, but there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and as with any other medical decision, we have to weigh the risks and benefits of every treatment. "
    There has been a lot of discussion about whether ear infections should always be treated with antibiotics, or whether in some situations(older child, less ill)"watchful waiting" might be appropriate—but it’s also true that many of us have become much more reluctant to diagnose ear infections in borderline cases.
    In a study that Dr. Finkelstein and his colleagues published this year, looking at antibiotic use in children in Massachusetts, the rate at which antibiotics were dispensed to the youngest group(3 to 24 months)had decreased 24 percent by 2008—2009 from 2000—2001. That drop was largely driven by a declining rate of diagnosis of ear infections.
    We always knew there were immediate risks to antibiotics. Children could have allergic reactions. They could get diarrhea. Babies could get unpleasant yeast infections—severe diaper rash, thrush in the mouth. But still, the thinking back when I trained was that after the antibiotics, the body would return to normal.
    " When antibiotics were developed, they were miraculous for all the reasons that you know," said Dr. Martin J. Blaser, the chairman of medicine at New York University School of Medicine. "With few exceptions, there was almost no long-term toxicity that was identifiable, and so everybody thought that if you took an antibiotic, it could produce some immediate upset—it could produce a rash, loose bowels—and then everything would return to normal, bounce back to normal. But in fact there was no real exploration of that. It just became an article of faith. "
    Dr. Blaser has devoted himself to a study of what is now called the microbiome, the bacterial population that lives on us and in us, and the effects of perturbing that population by antibiotic use. He and other researchers are asking questions about whether alterations in the microbiome may be linked to many different patterns of health, growth and disease. It’s an area of investigation that is still new, but changing quickly.
    Last summer, Dr. Blaser’s group published a study in The International Journal of Obesity in which they analyzed growth data from a large group of British children: those treated with antibiotics when very young(under 6 months)showed increased weight gain by a year of age, and were 22 percent more likely to be overweight at age 3.
    The influence of early antibiotics on the lungs has also been examined. A study in last month’s issue of the journal Pediatrics looked epidemiologically at another large population of children, and found an association between childhood antibiotic treatment and the later development of inflammatory bowel disease.
    Every one of these researchers started with an antibiotic pledge of allegiance. " We clearly have to use antibiotics and are lucky to have them around," said Dr. Matthew P. Kronman, lead author on the bowel disease study, who is a specialist in pediatric infectious diseases at the Seattle Children’s Hospital. "It’s just that we are still learning what all of their effects are. "
The phrase "in borderline cases" in Paragraph Six means that______.
选项 A、when patients can’t make up a decision
B、when antibiotics can be used or not used
C、when doctors can’t diagnose ear infections
D、when patients are in dangerous situations
答案B
解析 语义理解题。由题干定位至第六段。borderline原意为“边界上的，边界附近的”，由该段中的many of ushave become much more reluctant to diagnose ear infections in borderline cases可知，很多人在可选择的情况下，都不太愿意使用抗生素了，故选[B]。从第六段的内容可以看出，borderline cases是指这两种情况：总是使用抗生素，或是在某些情况下进行“等待观察”，所以其余三个选项均可排除。
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