Humanity’s greatest accomplishment of the past five decades, declared Bill Gates this week, is the reduction in the number of de

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问题     Humanity’s greatest accomplishment of the past five decades, declared Bill Gates this week, is the reduction in the number of deaths among young children by half, to 10 million a year in 2007. The world’s most successful capitalist heaped praise on the World Health Organization (WHO), while unveiling an ambitious new global scheme to eliminate polio within a few years.
    For his part, the agency’s top polio man, Bruce Aylward, described the fight against the disease in the language of markets: "Elimination is the venture capital of public health: the risks are huge but so too are the rewards."
    The use of this sort of language captures a change in public health in the past decade. The Gates Foundation, with its pots of money and businesslike approach, has transformed the bureaucratic and disheartened world of public health. It has helped revive ailing campaigns, including the fight against polio. This will now get a fresh $600m-plus, from British and German taxpayers, from the Rotary Club International, as well as from the Gates Foundation ($255m).
    The decline from 350,000 new cases in 1988 (when the goal of rapid polio eradication was first declared) to 2,000 cases now (chiefly in Nigeria, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan) looks like a near victory. But the final stretch is the hardest. Only one in 200 cases is readily vulnerable to early detection (as opposed to most victims of smallpox—a serious infectious disease that causes spots which leave deep marks on the skin, already eliminated). Polio is also far more infectious.
    Other obstacles are that the usual vaccine has not worked well in densely populated, disease-ridden central India. Researchers are now trying to find a vaccine that fits those conditions better. Neal Halsey, of Johns Hopkins University, says the "live" vaccines used commonly today must be backed up with further doses of "inactivated" vaccines. These need to become cheaper.
    The fighting in Afghanistan and Pakistan has hampered vaccination programs there. So have rumors among Muslims in northern Nigeria that the vaccination program was in fact a conspiracy to sterilize children. That allowed the polio virus to strengthen and spread. The Nigerian strain may have now reached a dozen other countries.
    The final push towards elimination will certainly be costly, though several recent studies suggest that it is cheaper to spend money on a big elimination effort now than to pay the price later for sustained vigilance and health costs. The prospect of a global revival is concentrating minds. That is why, despite the daunting challenges and potential donor fatigue, the world may end up making a go of elimination this time.
Muslims in northern Nigeria is cited as an example to show that

选项 A、eradication of polio has been hampered by the conspiracy of Muslims.
B、eradication of polio met many obstacles there.
C、vaccination program was harmful to the children there.
D、vaccination program strengthened and spread virus.

答案B

解析 根据Muslims in northern Nigeria定位到第五段。可以发现文中第四、五段讲述的都是疫苗接种(vaccine)在各国遇到的阻碍(obstacles),因此B项符合文意。A项conspiracy张冠李戴;C、D项陈述的只是Muslims的错误观念。
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