CNN 美国有线新闻 2014-09-19（打印版）

Fridays are awesome. I'm Carl Azuz. Welcome to CNN student news. First up, should Scotland be an independent country from the United Kingdom? Scottish voters will decide next week in a simple Yes-No vote. Scotland has been a division of the UK for 307 years. But its Independence Movement said those days should be over, in part because it believes Scots, not the central UK government, should be able to determine Scotland's future. Also Scotland has a lot of oil. The Independence Movement says if it separated from the UK, Scotland would be one of the riches countries in the world. The UK says Scotland has only 1/10 of the oil that the Independence Movement thinks it has. And Britain's government has been begging Scotland to stay part of the Union, which Britain calls one of the world's most successful unions. There are a lot of unanswered questions. How would this affect Sotland's economy? What currency would it have? Would it stay part of the European Union? All of these will need answers if Scots choose independence. Polls indicate the vote will be very close.

In West Africa, this year's outbreak of Ebola virus is merciless. That's the word from the United Nations. Liberia has been hit the hardest. The hemorrhagic fever has killed at least 1200 people there. Liberia's Finance Minister says his nation is at war with an enemy it can't see. The nation's healthcare system can't handle it. Efforts to stop the virus from spreading aren't working.

Here is the way it's supposed to work. For every Ebola patient, healthcare worker are supposed to keep track of every single person who has had close contact with them. If one of these contacts gets sick, he's supposed to be isolated. Then all of his contacts are followed until there are no more sick patients. It's called Contact Tracing. It's pretty simple but it's powerful and helped put a stop to SARS and to Small Pox. But in many parts of West Africa, Contact Tracing is breaking down. These slums are a big reason why. In many parts of West Africa, streets have no name; people have no addresses; there may not be maps. That means some contacts never get found. Here is why that's such a problem. A missed contact can spread Ebola to other contacts and they'll be missed too. That's why the CDC says even one missed contact can keep the outbreak going. By now in West Africa, they're entire chains of transmission that are invisible. The computers databases that keep track of all these cases and contacts often are not in good shape. One disease detective from CDC working in Sierra Leone, she says their computer database there is in shambles. The CDC has designed special software to keep track of these cases and these contacts and they tried to implement it in West Africa but even that hasn't gone smoothly. All of this is starting to add up and it has the World Health Organization really concerned.

CNN 美国有线新闻 2014-09-19（在线收听）