One of the main weapons to prevent mother-to-child transmission of the AIDS virus during birth is the drug nevirapine. But when nevirapine is used alone just once, HIV starts becoming resistant to it.  Research in Botswana shows that the resistance is not long lasting and that this affordable drug does not have to be abandoned forever by infected mothers who have already taken it. VOA's David McAlary reports.
    International medical guidelines call for pregnant women with advanced HIV to get a combination of AIDS drugs including nevirapine to prevent passing their infection on to their newborns during delivery. But in poor countries, combinations have been expensive and nevirapine has often been used alone, since studies have shown that a single dose can cut the transmission rate in half. 
    delivery: 分娩      dose: 剂量, (一)剂
    The problem is that HIV resistance builds against it quickly when used alone just once because other drugs are not present to kill the virus particles that survive nevirapine. This renders the drug less effective in later combinations for treating women after their baby is born. 
    particle: 微粒   render: 致使
    But the new study from Botswana shows that nevirapine can make a comeback for these women if they wait until the resistance subsides.
    subside: 减退, 衰减
    "The longer out you get from that exposure to single dose nevirapine, the less detectable nevirapine resistance is," said Shahin Lockman of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston.
    She is lead author of the study and she notes that the waiting period for women who get the single dose of nevirapine at delivery can be as short as six months.
    "If they started nevirapine-based treatment six or more months after nevirapine exposure, their treatment response was just as good, and really quite high, compared to women who did not have the single dose of nevirapine," she added.  "However, the women who started nevirapine-based treatment within six months of that nevirapine exposure were much more likely to experience treatment failure."
    The study published in the New England Journal of Medicine shows that waiting at least six months means that HIV-positive women are 70 percent more likely to benefit from nevirapine-based drug combinations again than women who get them sooner.
    An official with the U.S. government health agency that helped fund the study calls it very important.
    Lynne Mofenson is chief of research on child, adolescent, and maternal AIDS at the U.S. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. She says the finding supports a World Health Organization (WHO) recommendation restricting a single dose of nevirapine only to pregnant HIV-infected women who are healthy enough to wait six months after childbirth for more nevirapine-based therapy. Otherwise, they should get other drugs during labor.
    labor: 分娩
    "It shows the importance of screening women for treatment while they are pregnant and putting them on appropriate therapy while they are pregnant to avoid having to start them too soon after they received preventive therapy," she explained. 
    screen: 检测：测试或者检验疾病或感染存在与否
    preventive: 预防性的
    Shahin Lockman in Boston says the problem of nevirapine resistance should diminish now that more and more people are receiving combinations of AIDS drugs under expanded U.S. and international programs to deliver them to Africa and other regions hard hit by the virus.
    diminish: 减少

    2006 is China's Year of the Dog, but in Beijing, man's best friend is being forced into hiding. Authorities have started to enforce dog ownership laws, restricting households to just one dog, which must also be smaller than 35 centimeters tall. Beijing is estimated to be home to at least one million dogs, but only a fraction are registered or vaccinated -- this is what authorities say is the cause of the city's rabies problem.
    Some Beijing dog owners have taken their pets into hiding. The crackdown on large and unregistered dogs has many loving owners keeping their pets indoors, out of sight of prying neighbors and police. 
    crackdown: An act or example of forceful regulation, repression, or restraint
    prying: 爱打听的
    Angela Zheng is project coordinator for International Fund for Animal Welfare, a prominent animal rights lobbying group in Beijing. She says the harsh enforcement of the laws has really impacted the lives of city dog owners.
    prominent: 卓越的, 显著的
    lobby: 游说议员,对(议员)进行疏通
    harsh: 粗糙的, 荒芜的, 苛刻的
    "It caused a very serious mental pressure on them. Many dog owners hold a respected role in the community, are the backbone of society.  If they were to bring their unhappiness out into the open, it would have a great affect on the community.  The laws are creating an inharmonious element within society," she says. 
    backbone: 中枢, 骨干, 支柱
    inharmonious: 不合谐的, 不和睦的
    Authorities say the crackdown is an attempt to curb the growing number of rabies deaths. Chinese state media report some 1700 people died from rabies between January and August of this year. That's almost a 30 percent increase over the previous year, making it China's most deadly infectious disease. But it's the crackdown on large dogs that has most dog owners upset, and wondering why they have been singled out by the new law.
    curb: To check, restrain, or control as if with a curb; rein in
    rabies: 狂犬病
    single out: 挑选
    Li Shen has taken her golden retriever Li Tiao Tiao to her art studio on the outskirts of the city for safety. She says the laws are forcing her to act like a criminal, and she has no means to lobby the lawmakers for change. "There is anger in my heart, I don't know how to express it. I cannot destroy things, I cannot protest, but I really feel angry, it is so unreasonable."
    retriever: 能把猎物找回来的猎狗的一种
    outskirts: 边界, 市郊
    Chinese authorities might have thought their anti-rabies precautions would gain public support, for curbing a disease that is claiming so many victims. But many Chinese feel persecuted by the laws. It may be the Year of the Dog, but many dogs and their owners are feeling less than celebrated.
    persecute: 迫害

    This is the VOA Special English Development Report.
    In Pakistan, a company called Saiban creates housing communities for the poor.  About thirty percent of the country's population is estimated to live in unplanned settlements without legal right to the land.  
    Siaban buys land, then sells pieces of it to families to build houses.  Roads, water and electricity are provided. 
    In India, a small company makes and sells low-cost drip irrigation systems to poor farmers. IDE-India spent seven years researching and developing the equipment.  More than seventy-five thousand have been sold. 
    Both Saiban and IDE-India operate thanks to the Acumen Fund.  This nonprofit organization in New York helps people in developing countries build businesses to help the poor.  
    The Acumen Fund provides loans, equity investments and grants to entrepreneurs and existing businesses.  It operates like a venture capital organization.  
    Acumen works with local companies to create business plans for their goods and services. Then it guides them through the marketing and production process. Expert knowledge and technical assistance are provided.
    The Acumen Fund supports development in three areas: water, health and housing.  
    In Tanzania, it helped a company get the knowledge and equipment needed to produce chemically treated bed nets.  These protect against mosquitoes that spread malaria. 
    Today, A to Z Textile Mills is the third largest company in Tanzania. It has five thousand employees and produces about seven million bed nets a year. 
    Jacqueline Novogratz, a social entrepreneur, launched the Acumen Fund in two thousand one. The Rockefeller Foundation, Cisco Systems Foundation and three individuals donated money to start it.  
    Acumen has built a network of investors and experts.  The fund now supervises about twenty million dollars in investments in six countries: Egypt, India, Kenya, Pakistan, South Africa and Tanzania.  
    Spokeswoman Mariko Tada says Acumen is considering several new projects.  Within months, it hopes to invest more than one million dollars in a Kenyan company that helps farmers grow Artemisia. The plant is used as a compound in the malaria drug artemisinin.  
    And Acumen may invest in a private ambulance service in Mumbai, India. 
    That's the VOA Special English Development Report, written by Jill Moss.  You can find a link to the Acumen Fund Web site at voaspecialenglish.com.  I'm Shep O'Neal.

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    VOICE ONE:
    I'm Steve Ember. 
    VOICE TWO:
    And I'm Barbara Klein with People in America in VOA Special English. Today we tell about Jane Jacobs. She was an activist for improving cities.
    (MUSIC)    
    VOICE ONE: 
    Jane Jacobs was an activist, writer, moral thinker and economist. She believed cities should be densely populated and full of different kinds of people and activities. She believed in the value of natural growth and big open spaces. 
    She opposed the kind of city planning that involves big development and urban renewal projects that tear down old communities. She was also a critic of public planning officials who were unwilling to compromise.  
    Jacobs helped lead fights to save neighborhoods and local communities within cities.  She helped stop major highways from being built, first in New York City and later in Toronto, Canada. 
    Developers and city planners often criticized her ideas. Yet, many urban planning experts agree that her work helped shape modern thinking about cities.  
(MUSIC)
VOICE TWO:
    Jane Butzner was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in nineteen sixteen.  Her father was a doctor. Her mother was a former teacher and nurse. After graduating from high school, Jane took an unpaid position at the Scranton Tribune newspaper.  A year later she left Scranton for New York City.
    During her first several years in the city she held many kinds of jobs. One job was to write about workers in the city. She said these experiences gave her a better idea about what working in the city was like.  
    As a young woman, Jacobs had many interests, including economics, law, science and politics. Her higher education was brief, however. She studied for just two years at Columbia University in New York. Jacobs did not complete her college education, but she did become an excellent writer and editor. While working as a writer for the Office of War Information she met a building designer named Robert Jacobs.  
    In nineteen forty-four, they married. They later had three children.  Her husband's work led to her interest in the monthly magazine, Architectural Forum. Jacobs became a top editor for the publication.
    VOICE ONE:
    Experts have described Jacobs as a writer who wrote well, but not often. She is best known for her book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities". The book was published in nineteen sixty-one. It is still widely read today by both city planning professionals and the general public.  
    Experts say  "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" is the most influential book written about city planning in the twentieth century.   
    In the book, Jacobs criticized the urban renewal projects of the nineteen fifties.  She believed these policies destroyed existing inner-city communities and their economies.  
    She also thought that modern planning policies separated communities and created unnatural city areas. Jacobs described the nature of cities: their streets and parks, the different cultures represented by citizens and the safety of a well-planned city.  Safety was an important issue in big cities that had high rates of crime.  
    Jacobs wrote that peace on the streets of cities is not kept mainly by the police even though police are necessary. It is kept by a system of controls among the people themselves. She believed the problem of insecurity cannot be solved by spreading people out more thinly. 
    Jacobs argued that a well-used city street is safer than an empty street.  Safety, she argued, is guaranteed by people who watch the streets every day because they use the streets every day.
    (MUSIC)
    VOICE TWO:
    "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" became a guide for neighborhood organizers and the people who Jacobs called  "foot people". These are citizens who perform their everyday jobs on foot. They walk to stores and to work. They walk to eating places, theaters, parks, gardens and sports stadiums.  They are not who Jacobs called "car people" those who drive their cars everywhere.
    Jane Jacobs also believed that buildings of different sizes, kinds and condition should exist together.  She pointed to several communities as models of excellence. These include Georgetown in Washington, D.C.; the North End in Boston, Massachusetts; Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, California.  
    She also supported mixed-use buildings as a way to increase social interaction. Such buildings have stores and offices on the ground floor. People live on the upper floors. Mixed-use buildings are a lot more common in American cities than in the suburban areas around them. 
    VOICE ONE:
    Jane Jacobs also noted New York City's Greenwich Village as an example of an exciting city community.  This is one of the communities that was saved, in part at least, because of her writings and activism. In nineteen sixty-two, Jacobs headed a committee to stop the development of a highway through Lower Manhattan in New York City. The expressway would have cut right through Greenwich Village and the popular SoHo area.  
    Influential New York City developer Robert Moses proposed the plan.  But huge public protests in nineteen sixty-four led the city government to reject it. Jacobs' book, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" helped influence public opinion against the expressway.
    (MUSIC)
    VOICE TWO:
    In nineteen sixty-nine, Jacobs moved to the Canadian city of Toronto where she lived for the rest of her life. Part of her reason for leaving the United States was because she opposed the United States involvement in the war in Vietnam.  At that time, she had two sons almost old enough to be called for duty. Jacobs continued to be a community activist in Toronto. 
    She was involved in a campaign to stop the Spadina Expressway through Toronto. This highway would have permitted people living in suburban areas outside Toronto to travel into and out of the city easily.  
    Jacobs organized citizens against the Spadina Expressway and the politicians who supported it. One of her most important issues was this question: "Are we building cities for people or for cars?"
    Today, experts say Toronto is one of only a few major cities in North America to have successfully kept a large number of neighborhoods in its downtown area.  Many experts believe this is because of the anti-Spadina movement led by Jane Jacobs. 
    VOICE ONE:
    Jane Jacobs spent her life studying cities.  She wrote seven books on urban planning, the economy of cities, and issues of commerce and politics.  Her last book, published in two thousand four, was "Dark Age Ahead." In it, Jacobs described several major values that she believed were threatened in the United States and Canada. These included community and family, higher education, science and technology and a government responsive to citizens' needs. 
    In "Dark Age Ahead",Jacobs argued that Western society could be threatened if changes were not made immediately.  She said that people were losing important values that helped families succeed.  
    In "Dark Age Ahead", Jacobs also criticized how political decision-making is influenced by economics. Governments, she said, have become more interested in wealthy interest groups than in the needs of the citizens. Jacobs also warned against a culture that prevents people from preventing the destruction of resources upon which all citizens depend.  
    (MUSIC)
    VOICE TWO:
    Jane Jacobs had her critics. Many of them argued that her ideas failed to represent the reality of city politics, which land developers and politicians often control. Others argued that Jacobs had little sympathy for people who want a lifestyle different from the one she proposed.  
    Still, many urban planning experts say her ideas shaped modern thinking about cities. She has had a major influence on those who design buildings and towns that aim to increase social interaction among citizens. 
    Jane Jacobs died in two thousand six in Toronto at the age of eighty-nine. Her family released a statement on her death. It said: "What's important is not that she died but that she lived, and that her life's work has greatly influenced the way we think. Please remember her by reading her books and implementing her ideas."
    (MUSIC)
    VOICE ONE:
    This program was written by Jill Moss.  It was produced by Lawan Davis.  I'm Steve Ember. 
    VOICE TWO:
    And I'm Barbara Klein.  You can read scripts and download audio from our Web site, voaspecialenglish.com.  Join us again next week for People in America in VOA Special English.