This is the VOA Special English Health Report.
这里是美国之音慢速英语健康报道。
When parents go to work, their young children often spend the day in child care. That contact with other children can make it easier to get sick. But new research suggests that this might have a protective effect a few years later when children start school.
当父母上班时通常将孩子送到托儿所。在托儿所与其他孩子的接触使得孩子更容易生病。但新的研究表明，这可能会在孩子几年后开始上学时起到一种保护作用。
A research team looked at data from a large study. That study followed the health of a group of Canadian children for almost their first ten years of life.
一个研究小组分析了一项大型研究的数据，该研究跟踪调查了一组加拿大儿童前十年的健康状况。
Sylvana Cote at the University of Montreal led the research team. She says some of the children were more likely to get sick from the kinds of infections commonly passed around a day care center. But she says these children were also more likely to avoid infections when they entered elementary school a few years later.
蒙特利尔大学的西尔瓦纳·柯特（Sylvana Cote）领导了这个研究小组。她称，有些儿童更可能感染各种通常在日间护理中心传播的疾病。但她表示，这些儿童在几年后上小学时也更可能避免感染。
SYLVANA COTE: "Children who started child care early -- that is, before two and a half years -- and who attended child care where there were a large group of children, they have lower rates of infections than children who either never went to day care or children who went to small-group day care."
柯特：“更早被送到托儿所的孩子--通常指2岁半，以及进入儿童数量众多的托儿所的孩子，比没上过日托或小型日托的孩子感染率更低。”
Sylvana Cote says her study was not really designed to explain why children who started day care early with many other children had fewer infections later. But she says there is a non-medical reason why getting sick early might be better: it reduces the risk of having to stay home from school.
柯特称她的研究并非用于解释为什么更早日托的孩子以后感染率会更低。但她称，早期生病可能更好还存在一个非医学原因：这降低了生病后必须离校呆在家里的风险。
SYLVANA COTE: "We argue in the paper that missing school when you're starting to learn to read or when you learn to write may be more problematic for the future academic trajectory than missing day care days."
柯特：“在论文中我们认为，当开始学习读写后缺课，比在日托时缺席对未来的学术轨迹影响更大。”
The research appears in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, a journal of the American Medical Association.
该研究发表在美国医学协会期刊《少儿医学文献》上。
Some diseases can be prevented by vaccines. This month, the World Health Organization launched the first vaccine ever developed for Africa.
有些疾病可以通过疫苗预防。本月，世界卫生组织推出了有史以来首份针对非洲研制的疫苗。
The vaccine is designed to provide ten years of low-cost protection against meningococcal A. This bacterial form of meningitis can cause brain damage and death. Major epidemics strike Africa every seven to fourteen years. Children and young adults are the hardest hit.
该疫苗旨在为A群脑膜炎双球菌提供十年的低成本预防。这种细菌会导致脑损伤和脑死亡。一些主要流行病每7到14年袭击非洲。儿童和青少年是患病重灾区。
Last year, an outbreak across sub-Saharan Africa killed more than five thousand people. The WHO says as many as four hundred fifty million people across Africa are at risk from meningitis.
去年，撒哈拉以南非洲的一次传染病爆发造成5千多人死亡。世界卫生组织称，非洲各地多达4.5亿人面临感染脑膜炎的风险。
The new vaccine is called MenAfriVac. It can be given to children as young as one, which is earlier than vaccines currently used to fight meningitis epidemics in Africa.
这种新疫苗被称为MenAfriVac。它可以用于一岁儿童，比当前非洲抗击脑膜炎流行使用的疫苗适用时间更早。
Health workers launched the new vaccine in Burkina Faso in West Africa. There are twenty-five countries along Africa's so-called meningitis belt from Senegal to Ethiopia. The hope is that people in all twenty-five countries will be protected against the disease by twenty-fifteen.
卫生工作者在西非的布基纳法索推出了这种新疫苗。从塞内加尔到埃塞俄比亚，沿非洲所谓的脑膜炎地带有25个国家。人们希望，这所有25个国家的人民在2015年能够预防这种疾病。