《自然》年度十大人物之四

SHEIK HUMARR KHAN: 埃博拉医生

一个与致命病毒作战的传染病医生

By Erika Check Hayden

作者：Erika Check Hayden

Pardis Sabeti

In this year's devastating outbreak of Ebola, Sheik Humarr Khan played a unique part. He was a scientist — part of the team that performed the first genetic sequencing studies of the virus in his native Sierra Leone. He was an infectious-disease doctor who
turned down an invitation to leave his country so that he could stay and treat patients. He also became one of its many victims, dying on 29 July.

在今年爆发的埃博拉病毒中，Sheik Humarr Khan扮演者不可或缺角色。他是他的祖国塞拉利昂第一个就是病毒基因序列的科学技术。他是一个决绝了出国邀请而留下来治疗病人的传染病学家。他也成为了众多病人中的一个，于今年六月29日死于埃博拉病毒。

Ebola brought devastation to Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia as it ballooned into an epidemic during 2014. Khan was the lead physician at Sierra Leone's Kenema Government Hospital, where he was treating and studying Lassa, another potentially fatal viral disease,
until the hospital was overwhelmed by people with Ebola.

埃博拉病毒在今年在几内亚、塞拉利昂和利比里亚大规模爆发。Khan是塞拉利昂政府医院的首席物理学家，当时他正在研究另外一种原始的超级病毒，直到他的医院迅速被埃博拉病人占领了。

According to those who knew him, Khan believed that research and medicine should serve everyone — not just those able to access and afford it — and he had eschewed offers to make more money working in the capital, Freetown, to stay in the underserved rural
region of Kenema. “That was one of the more important examples he set,” says John Schieffelin, a physician at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, who worked with Khan.

据了解他的人说，Khan坚信他的研究和药物能帮助每个人，而不仅仅是那些能买得起的人，他拒绝了首都一家医院高新的聘请决定留在病毒的发源地。一个曾经和他工作的朋友说，他为大家树立了很重要的榜样。

Khan became a central figure in the Kenema community and when Ebola struck, he cancelled his plans to teach abroad. When he became sick himself, his doctors decided not to give him the experimental treatment known as ZMapp in case it backfired and caused dangerous
side effects. Some staff at the hospital worried that his death would spark civil unrest. “They said that if Dr Khan dies, people in Kenema are going to tear the hospital down,” remembers Lina Moses, an epidemiologist also at Tulane who spent much of the year
working in Kenema.

当埃博拉病毒爆发的时候，Khan是当时医院的关键人物，他取消了出国教书的计划。当他也感染的时候，他的医生决定不给他ZMapp实验性的治疗因为这太危险了而且有非常大的副作用。一些医院的工作人员担心他的死会引发更大的恐慌，一个叫Lina Moses流行病学家说如果Khan死了，整个医院都会为他哭泣。

The outbreak now looks as though it is levelling off, and drug and vaccine trials are getting under way. The research that Khan was involved in showed how quickly the virus was mutating, and the team he worked with is now installing genetic sequencers throughout
West Africa so that they can continue to track its evolution.

现在埃博拉看起来正在得到控制，相关药物和疫苗的实验正在进行，Khan的研究显示病毒的传染速度是十分惊人的，他们的团队正在进行病毒基因序列的测试工作以跟踪它的变异。

But the toll has been great: Ebola has killed around 6,300 people, including many doctors and other health-care workers. Recovering from this loss of scarce experts will be a tremendous challenge, says Estrella Lasry, a tropical-medicine specialist for Médecins
Sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders) in New York City. “It's going to take years before the same number of people who died are trained”.

目前，埃博拉所造成的死亡数字是十分惊人的，6300人死亡，其中包括很多的医生和医护人员。一个来自纽约的无国界医生组织的药物专家说，从医生的损失中恢复过来是一个巨大的挑战，要培养同样数量的已经牺牲的医生需要花费数年的时间。