Part B
Directions:
In the following article, some sentences have been removed. For Questions 41—45, choose the most suitable one from the list A—F to fit into each of the numbered blank. There is one extra choice, which does not fit in any of the gaps. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1. (10 points)
Does the publisher of Douglas Starrs excellent Blood—An Epic History of Medicine and Commerce actually expect to sell many copies? Whoever chose the title, certain to scare off the squeamish, and the subtitle, which makes the effort sound like a dry, dense survey text, has really done this book a disservice. In fact, the brave and curious will enjoy a brightly written, intriguing, and disquieting book, with some important lessons for public health. 41) .
The book begins with a historical look at centuries of lore about blood—in particular, the belief that blood carried the evil humors of disease and required occasional draining. As recently as the Revolutionary War, bloodletting was widely employed to treat fevers. The idea of using one persons blood to heal another is only about 75 years old—although rogue scientists had experimented with transfusing animal blood at least as early as the 1600s. The first transfusion experiments involved stitching a donors vein (in early cases the physicians) to a patients vein.
42)。 Sabotaged by notions about the “purity” of their groups blood, Japan and Germnay lagged well behind the Allies in transfusion science. Once they realized they were losing injured troops the Allies had learned to save, they tried to catch up, conducting horrible and unproductive experiments such as draining blood from POWs and injecting them with horse blood or polymers.
43)。
During the early to mid1980s, Starr says, 10,000 American hemophiliacs and 12,000 others contracted HIV from transfusions and receipt of blood products. Blood banks both home and abroad moved slowly to acknowledge the threat of the virus and in some cases even acted with criminal negligence, allowing the distribution of blood they knew was tainted. This is not new material. But Starrs insights add a dimension to a story first explored in the late Randy Shiltss And the Bond Played On.
44)。
Is the blood supply safe now? Screening procedures and technology have gotten much better. Yet its disturbing to read Starrs contention that a person receiving multiple transfusions today has about a 1 in 90,000 chance of contracting HIV—far higher than the “one in a million” figure that blood bankers once blithely and falsely quoted. Moreover, new pathogens threaten to emerge and spread through the increasingly highspeed, global bloodproduct network faster than science can stop them. This prompts Starr to argue that todays blood stores are “simultaneously safer and more threatening” than when distribution was less sophisticated.
45)。
［A］ The massive wartime blood drives laid the groundwork for modern bloodbanking, which has saved countless lives. Unfortunately, these developments also set the stage for a great modern tragedy—the spread of AIDS through the international blood supply.
［B］ There is so much drama, power, resonance, and important information in this book that it would be a shame if the squeamish were scared off. Perhaps the key lessones this: The public health must always be guarded against the pressures and pitfalls of competitive markets and human fallibility.
［C］ In his “chronicle of resource,” Starr covers an enormous amount of ground. He gives us an account of mankinds attitudes over a 400year period towards this “precious, mysterious, and hazardous material;” of medicines efforts to understand, control, and develop bloods lifesaving properties; and of the multibilliondollar industry that profits from it. He describes disparate institutions that use blood, from the military and the pharmaceutical industry to blood banks. The culmination is a rich examination of how something as horrifying as distributing blood tainted with the HIV virus could have occurred.
［D］ The books most interesting section considers the huge strides transfusion science took during World War Ⅱ。 Medicine benefited tremendously from the initiative to collect and supply blood to the Allied troops and from new trauma procedures developed to administer it. It was then that scientists learned to separate blood into useful elements, such as freezedried plasma and clotting factors, paving the way for both battlefield mirdcles and dramatic improvement in the lives of hemophiliacs.
［E］ Starrs tale ends with a warning about the safety of todays blood supply.
［F］ Starr obtained memos and other evidence used in Japanese, French, and Canadian criminal trials over the taintedblood distribution. (American blood banks enjoyed legal protections that made U.S. trials more complex and provided less closure for those harmed.) His account of the French situation is particularly poignant. Starr explains that in postwar France, giving blood, was viewed as a sacred and patriotic act. Prison populations were urged to give blood as a way to connect more with society. Unfortunately, the French came to believe that such benevolence somehow offered a magical protection to the blood itself and that it would be unseemly to question volunteer donors about their medical history or sexual or drug practices.
