Travelers May Spread Drug-Resistance Gene From South Asia

July 4th, 2011 at 07:54am Under Health report

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This is the VOA Special English Health Report.

Scientists say they have found dangerous forms of bacteria in the drinking water of New Delhi, India. The bacteria has a gene scientists call New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase, or NDM-1. The gene is dangerous because it can make bacteria resistant to antibiotic drugs.

Researchers from the University of Cardiff in Britain led the study. They found the NDM-1 bacteria present in two of fifty drinking water samples. They also found it in seepage water – the water that children might play in on streets. The gene was found in eleven bacterial species, including those that cause cholera and dysentery, a diarrheal disease.

The researchers also reported finding NDM-1 in bacteria from medical patients. The patients were from India and other South Asian countries, Europe and North America.

The scientists now estimate that about one hundred million Indians with the bacteria are traveling around the world. Timothy Walsh leads the NDM-1 research at University of Cardiff. He says he is concerned about the gene spreading.

TIMOTHY WALSH: “The gene pool in India, Pakistan, probably Bangladesh and even Sri Lanka, is absolutely huge. Wherever these people travel they carry their normal flora with them, one hundred trillion bacteria. Therefore the ultimate consequence of this is it can spread worldwide.”

The United States government reported the presence of NDM-1 in three people last year. All had been to India earlier for medical treatment.

Experts say people with the NDM-1 form of bacteria in their body can remain healthy. The danger is created if you get bacteria that cause disease. The gene can produce the disease bacteria and make enzymes to fight even the most powerful antibiotics. Antibiotics are the main treatment for bacterial infections.

Officials in India say its water supply is safe. Vishwa Mohan Katoch is the Director General of Health Services. He says the bacteria do not usually cause a problem.

However, officials in New Delhi are investigating. Timothy Walsh says he offered his team to help in the investigation, but Indian officials rejected the invitation. He worries about the science of the study.

TIMOTHY WALSH: “My fear is that this investigation that they are going to undertake will almost certainly not employ the right methods and the study designed will be quite poor and therefore I’m not convinced that the outcome will be scientifically credible.”

Professor Walsh also says its time for the international community to force countries to follow World Health Organization guidelines for antibiotic use.

And that’s the VOA Special English Health Report written by Caty Weaver and Vidushi Sinha. For more news about health, and to download our reports, go to voaspecialenglish.com. You can also follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube and VOA Learning English. I’m Steve Ember.

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A New Reason for Why the Deaf May Have Trouble Reading

June 28th, 2011 at 07:20am Under Health report

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This is the VOA Special English Health Report.

Deaf people may have no trouble communicating any idea in American Sign Language, or ASL, that can be expressed in English. But studies of ASL signers show that, on average, deaf high school seniors are likely to read at the level of a nine-year-old.

The explanation has always been that this is because they never learned to connect letters with sounds. But a recent study shows that deaf readers are just like other people learning to read in a second language. Linguist Jill Morford led the study.

JILL MORFORD: “The assumption has always been that the problems with reading were educational issues with what’s the right way to teach reading when you can’t associate sounds with letters. But what we’re finding is that all this time we’ve been ignoring the fact that they’re actually learning a new language.”

Ms. Morford is a professor at the University of New Mexico and part of a research center at Gallaudet University in Washington. Most students at Gallaudet are deaf; the center studies how deaf people learn and use language.

Professor Morford says signers are like English learners whose first language uses a different alphabet.

JILL MORFORD: “Anyone who has a first language that has a written system that’s very different than English, like Arabic or Chinese or Russian, knows that learning to recognize and understand words in English is much more challenging than if you already speak a language that uses the same orthography.”

The orthography is the written system and spelling of a language. Of course, with signers, their first language has no written system at all, just hand gestures. Gallaudet professor Tom Allen explains what effect this has on reading.

TOM ALLEN: “We’re not dealing with representations in the brain which are primarily auditory. You know, people when they read, they kind of hear — there’s a silent hearing going on when you read a word, when a hearing person reads a word. When a deaf person reads a word, there’s not. They see the word and there’s some kind of an orthographic representation. And some of the research in our center has shown that when deaf readers read an English word, it activates their sign representations of those words.”

Signers can face the same problems as other bilingual people. Their brains have to choose between two languages all the time. Take the words “paper” and “movie.” Their spelling and meaning are not at all similar. But, as Professor Allen points out, the signs for them are.

TOM ALLEN: “The sign for paper, you hold one hand flat and you just lightly tap it with a flat palm on the other hand, and you do that a couple times and that means paper. Now, movie is, like, very similar. One of the hands keeps a flat hand shape and it just kind of lightly moves back and forth as if it were a flickering image on a screen.”

The study is in the journal Cognition.

And that’s the VOA Special English Health Report, written by Kelly Nuxoll. To learn about other research on bilingualism, go to voaspecialenglish.com. And you can find captioned videos of our reports on the VOA Learning English channel on YouTube. I’m Steve Ember.

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Clarification: An earlier version of this story may have suggested that American Sign Language is based on English words. ASL and English are independent languages. Also, studies of reading levels in ASL signers were based on high school seniors, not “educated adults.”

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