 Welcome to Learning English, a daily 30-minute program from the Voice of America. I'm Ashley Thompson. And I'm Dan Novak. This program is designed for English learners, so we speak a little slower, and we use words and phrases, especially written for people learning English. Coming up on the program, Gina Bennett reports on how birds in North America will no longer be named after people. Gregory Stockle has a story on Colombia's efforts to control invasive hippos. Katie Weaver has this week's health and lifestyle report on a possible cure for sickle-cell disease. Later, Jill Robbins and Andrew Smith present the lesson of the day, but first, Birds in North America will no longer be named after people. The American Ornithological Society announced the move Wednesday. Next year, the organization will begin to rename around 80 birds found in the United States and Canada. Colleen Handel is the organization's president. She said, there is power in a name, and some English bird names have associations with the past that continue to be exclusionary and harmful today. Everyone who loves and cares about birds should be able to enjoy and study them freely, Handel added. Rather than review each bird named after a person individually, all birds named after people will be renamed, the organization announced. Birds that will be renamed include those currently called Wilson's Warbler and Wilson's Snipe. Those are both named after the 19th century naturalist Alexander Wilson. Audubon's Shearwater, a seabird named for John James Audubon, also will get a new name. In 2020, the organization renamed a bird that used to be named after Confederate Army General John P. McCown. It is now called the Thick-Build Longspur. I'm really happy and excited about the announcement, said Emily Williams. She is an ornithologist at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., who was not involved in the decision. She said debates over bird names have been happening among bird watchers for the past several years. Naming birds based on habitat or appearance is one of the least problematic approaches, Williams said. Earlier this year, the National Audubon Society announced that it would keep its name. Some critics argued that the group should lose its connection to John James Audubon, whose family owned slaves. The name has come to represent so much more than the work of one person, Susan Bell told Audubon Magazine in March. She is chair of the National Audubon Society's Board of Directors. Bell added, we must reckon with the racist legacy of John James Audubon. A 2020 incident in New York's Central Park has been reported as an example of discrimination that black people sometimes face when trying to enjoy the outdoors. Christian Cooper, a black bird watcher, was looking for birds when he asked a white woman, Amy Cooper, to follow local rules and leash her dog. Cooper called the police and was later charged with filing a false police report. Police later dropped the charge. Soon after, a group of bird watchers organized the first Black Birders Week for black nature lovers and scientists. I'm Gina Bennett. Colombia will try to control its population of more than 100 hippopotamuses, large animals from Africa. The South American country aims to control the big animals using several methods. Animals might sterilize the animals through a medical operation. They might move the hippos to other countries or possibly euthanize them, the government said recently. The animals' ancestors were brought to the country by the late Pablo Escobar in the 1980s. Escobar was the leader of an illegal drug operation in Colombia. The hippos have spread from Escobar's home to nearby rivers where they have reproduced. They have no natural predators in Colombia and the government has declared them as an invasive animal that could hurt the environment. Animals estimate there are 169 hippos in Colombia and that many of them are in the Magdalena River area. They estimate that if no measures are taken, there could be 1,000 by 2035. President-Minister Susana Muhammad said the first step of the plan will be to sterilize 40 hippos each year and this will begin soon. The method is costly. Each sterilization costs about $9,800 and there are risks for the hippos including reactions to medicines or death, as well as risks to health officials, the ministry said. The hippos live across a large area. They are territorial and aggressive. Experts say sterilization alone is not enough to control the growth of the invasive animals. The government announced in March that it is planning to possibly move the animals to other countries. Muhammad said Colombian officials have contacted officials in Mexico, India, and the Philippines. And they are considering a plan to send 60 hippos to India. We are working on the protocol for the export of the animals, she said. We are not going to export a single animal if there is no authorization from the environmental authority of the other country. As a last means to control the population, the ministry is creating a protocol to euthanize the animals. A group of hippos was brought in the 1980s to Hacienda, Nepalese. The place was Escobar's private zoo. Now it receives many visitors after his death in 1993. Most of the animals live freely in rivers there and reproduce without control. I'm Gregory Stockle. A group of health experts recently announced that a new gene editing treatment for sickle cell disease was safe for patients. The treatment could provide a new cure that attacks the disease at its genetic source. Sickle cell disease, SCD, is a genetic blood disorder that affects millions of people worldwide. The disease is common in places with high cases of malaria, like Africa and India. It strikes among black Americans, Africans, and Middle Easterners more often than other groups. Scientists believe being a carrier of SCD helps protect against severe malaria. People with SCD carry unhealthy blood cells that result in blockages called blood clots. This can cause pain and damage bones and organs in the human body. The World Health Organization said many children with the most severe form of the disease die before the age of five, usually from an infection or severe blood loss. Vortex pharmaceuticals and CRISPR therapeutics make the new treatment called XSL. The treatment involves permanently changing the genetic material, DNA, in a patient's blood cells. The goal is to help the body return to healthy blood cell production. Healthy blood cells are present at birth, but abnormal cells begin to develop in people with sickle cell disease. When patients receive the treatment, stem cells are removed from their blood, and the gene editing tool, CRISPR, is used to remove the switching gene. Patients get medicines to kill off other damaged blood producing cells, and then are given back their changed stem cells. Vortex reported 46 people got the treatment in its study. Among 30 of them who had at least 18 months of observation, 29 were free of pain crises for at least a year. All 30, Vortex reported, avoided being hospitalized for pain crises for that long. Victoria Gray of Mississippi was the first patient to test the XSL treatment. Gray told researchers at a scientific gathering earlier this year that she had suffered from pain since childhood. She described feeling reborn the day she got the treatment. My children no longer have a fear of losing their mom to sickle cell disease, she said. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, FDA, had already found the treatment effective in a study of SCD patients. The health agency, however, was not sure if the small genetic sample size used in the study captured the entire U.S. population for sickle cell disease. With the expert's findings, the FDA is likely to approve the treatment in early December for patients aged 12 and older. If the treatment is approved, Vortex has also proposed to follow up with patients to study its safety for another 15 years. Vortex has not said how much the treatment will cost. But the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review estimates the cost could be around $2 million for the treatment. By comparison, research earlier this year showed medical costs for sickle cell treatments from birth to age 65 could add up to $1.7 million. Dr. Allison King of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri cares for children and young adults with sickle cell disease. She told the Associated Press that the new treatments would be costly. But if you think about it, she said, how much is it worth for someone to feel better and not be in pain and not be in the hospital all the time? I'm Katie Weaver. You just heard today's Health and Lifestyle Report. Katie Weaver joins me now to talk more about the story. Welcome back, Katie. Hi, Dan. Nice to see you. Katie, you reported on a possible cure for sickle cell disease. Can you tell me a little more about the condition? Our listeners might not know the word sickle. What does it mean? Well, SCD is a genetic condition that deforms red blood cells. It is also called sickle cell anemia. The red blood cells of a person with SCD become sticky and harden into an unusual shape like that of a sickle, a hand tool with a sharp rounded edge used to cut grasses and other plants. The pain from sickle cell disease is intense. How have doctors traditionally treated the sickness? Current treatments include medications and blood transfusions. The only permanent solution is a bone marrow transplant, which must come from a closely matched donor without the disease and brings a risk of rejection. But this new treatment in your report requires no donors. That's right. It uses the patient's own genetic material. That is a big step forward because there is little risk of rejection. Well, let's hope this new treatment can bring about a cure. Thanks for coming on the show, Katie. You bet. I enjoyed it, Dan. My name is Anna Matteo. My name is Andrew Smith. And I'm Jill Robbins. You're listening to The Lesson of the Day on the Learning English podcast. Welcome to the part of the show where we help you do more with our series, Let's Learn English. The series shows Anna Matteo in her work and life in Washington, D.C. On The Lesson of the Day, we like to help you learn from even small amounts of the language you hear in the Let's Learn English series. Sometimes you can learn a lot from just a little. Listen now to the beginning of Lesson 32 of the series. See if you can notice little expressions Anna uses. First to show excitement and then to show that she is worried. Hello. Today is a big day. My first children's show is on television. Woohoo! I'm excited and nervous. Hello, Anna. Hello, Ms. Weaver. Some people are going to watch your children's show. After they watch it, they'll tell me what they liked and what they didn't like. Oh dear. Oh dear is what we call an interjection. Those are words, sounds, or phrases we use to quickly show feelings. Oh dear shows that Anna is worried about whether people will like her new children's show. Ms. Weaver also looks very serious in the video, so I think Anna is worried about that too. But what interjection did Anna use to show her excitement? Hello. Today is a big day. My first children's show is on television. Woohoo! I'm excited. Woohoo is right. When we get good news or are excited about something, we sometimes use this interjection. It's not really a word, it's more just like a sound. It's an interjection. Interjection. Interjection. Interjection. Interjection. Interjection. And what other interjection does Anna often say to show she is excited? Here's a hint. It begins with the AW sound. And it is also a real word in English. And the interjection is? Americans say this expression a lot, but our listeners might be curious to know what other meaning the word has. Awesome is an adjective. And the noun form of the word is AW, spelled A-W-E. To feel AW is to feel very amazed or even frightened or fearful when you see or experience something big or special. For example, if you are looking at a huge mountain or the world's tallest building or a natural wonder such as the Grand Canyon in the United States, you might have the feeling of AW. And so you would say that the mountain or building is an awesome sight or an awesome thing to behold. Behold is sort of a fancy word that just means to see or look at. Jill, Anna said, oh dear, because she suddenly felt worried. What are some other polite interjections we use when we are disappointed, upset or worried? We say uh-oh if we think something is wrong, like if we've made a mistake or a machine is broken and if we get bad news or a bad result, we can say polite interjections like darn, rats, shucks, or shoot. That's right, believe it or not, we sometimes make mistakes when we are doing this podcast and we might say something like that. For another example, if you are playing a sport and you make a bad mistake, you might say rats. Of course, native speakers also say curse words, or words that are not polite, has interjections to express negative feelings such as frustration, anger, or disappointment. But we'll let our listeners find those on their own. You're darn right, we will. I'm Jill Robbins and you're listening to the Lesson of the Day on the Learning English Podcast. Now let's go back to the beginning of Lesson 32. Listen to Ms. Weaver again. Some people are going to watch your children's show. After they watch it, they'll tell me what they liked and what they didn't like. Here's a bit of grammar for our listeners. In her second sentence, Ms. Weaver uses what we call a noun clause as the direct object of the verb tell. After they watch it, they'll tell me what they liked and what they didn't like. The noun clause is the words what they liked. A clause has a subject and a verb. The subject is the pronoun they and the verb is liked. Together, the words what they liked act just like a noun because they are the object of the verb tell. They'll tell me what they liked. One mistake people learning English make is they will say what did they like in this situation because the word what makes it seem like a question. But it's not a question. It's just a noun object of the verb. That's right. Like if I say tell me the answer, the word answer is the object. So the noun clause works the same way. I can say tell me what you think. What you think is the object. But what about the pronoun me in the sentence tell me what you think? That is called the indirect object. It's like saying tell what you think to me. But in English, we usually put the pronoun before the direct object. We can hear more examples of the indirect object in lesson 32. Listen as Anna explains the special machine she will use in her children's show. Hello, I'm Anna. Welcome to the Time Traveling Treehouse. This is not a usual treehouse. It can time travel. That's why it's called the Time Traveling Treehouse. Anna, do not forget me. Of course not. This is my partner, Mindy. My name means massive information navigation device for you. That means we can travel to many places and learn many things. Kids from all over the world ask us questions. We find them answers. Woohoo! That is right, Anna. Mindy, what is our first question? Laila asks us this question. We hope you heard the interjection that the machine named Mindy used. And the examples with pronouns as indirect objects placed before the direct object were these. Kids from all over the world ask us questions. We find them answers. And Laila asks us this question. On our website at learningenglishatvoanews.com you can download for free the lesson plan that goes with lesson 32 of Let's Learn English. It explains direct and indirect objects and many other things about lesson 32. And now here's a little poem that uses many indirect objects. You gave me your hand and opened your heart. You gave us a chance to make a new start. I'll tell you my hopes. I'll tell you my dreams. I'll give you my love and all that it means. Like rivers that run from hills to the sea, we'll flow day by day together and free. I offer my words. I open my door. The day you walk in, I need nothing more. Oh that's really sweet Andrew. I hope your girlfriend likes it when you find her. I hope she does too. And remember that you can ask us questions by writing us at learningenglishatvoanews.com. You could also find us on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Thanks for listening to the Lesson of the Day on the Learning English Podcast. I'm Jill Robbins. And I'm Andrew Smith. And that's our program for today. Join us again tomorrow to keep learning English through stories from around the world. I'm Ashley Thompson. And I'm Dan Novak.