Growing number of diseases jump from exotic beasts to humans
Pastor Dale Morgan
Rv:6:8: And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on
him was Death,
and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the
fourth part of the earth,
to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts
of the earth.
WASHINGTON (AP) - The monkeypox outbreak illustrates a
growing problem: Exotic beasts give exotic diseases to people who
get too close, a trend that some medical specialists call a serious
public health threat.
Such diseases can become a threat not just to the people who buy
and sell exotic pets, but to the general public if they spread to
native
animals and become established in the United States. Federal health
officials are working frantically to ensure doesn't happen with
monkeypox.
"This is a harbinger of things to come," warns Michael Osterholm of
the University of Minnesota, who advises the government on
infectious disease - and has long warned that there's too little
oversight of the health threats of imported animals.
"There are some of us who feel like lone voices in the night" in
calling for better scrutiny, adds Peter Jahrling, a scientist at
the U.S.
Army Medical Research Institute. "Perhaps incidents like this might
bring some much-needed re-examinations."
Monkeypox, a relative of smallpox usually found in tropical African
forests, apparently jumped from an imported Gambian giant rat into
prairie dogs when both species were being housed together by an
exotic pet distributor in Illinois.
Health officials are investigating nearly three dozen possible cases
of monkeypox in people who bought or cared for the prairie dogs, in
Wisconsin, Indiana and Illinois. The outbreak marks the first time
monkeypox has been detected in the Western Hemisphere.
Nor is it the only threat, say critics who fear a growing trend.
SARS, the respiratory epidemic, is thought to have come from civet
cats bred as an exotic meat in Chinese markets where bats, snakes,
badgers and other animals live in side-by-side cages until they
become someone's dinner.
Japan recently banned the importation of prairie dogs because they
can carry plague. The rodents had been wildly popular as pets in
that country.
Just last summer, a group of prairie dogs caught in South Dakota
was discovered to have another dangerous infection, tularemia -
noticed only after the animals were shipped to 10 other states and
five other countries. While the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention never recorded any human illnesses, it advised adults
who handled the ill rodents to take precautionary antibiotics.
Then there's salmonella, which iguanas and other reptiles, as
well as
birds, routinely shed in their feces. The CDC counts a stunning
90,000 people a year believed to have caught salmonella from some
form of contact with a reptile, either touching it or touching a
surface where the reptile had tracked the bacteria.
A common scenario, Osterholm says: Parents wash the reptile cage
in a bathtub or sink their child uses, and the child gets sick.
Salmonella can be life-threatening in children.
Worse is if a disease jumps from exotic pets into native wildlife
- a
threat whenever owners dump an animal that gets too large or
tiresome to care for.
CDC's Dr. Steve Ostroff made a plea Monday for prairie-dog owners
not to release their animals into the wild, but to call a
veterinarian or
their state health department for proper care information. Call
ahead
before taking a sick prairie dog to a veterinary clinic to guard
against
possible exposure of other animals to monkeypox, he said.
Already, a sick prairie dog has infected a rabbit who lived in the
same house; Jahrling worries that hamsters and gerbils could be
incubating monkeypox from pet-store transmission; in Africa,
squirrels carry the virus.
"Even if we do manage to bring the prairie dog problem under
control, . . . it's very important that we keep our guard up" by
watching for monkeypox in other species, Ostroff said Monday.
There are no good counts of how many exotic animals are sold, but
they're immensely popular, says Richard Farinato, director of the
Humane Society of America's captive wildlife program. Some 800,000
iguanas alone are imported for the pet trade.
There is little federal scrutiny of most imported animals for
potential
human health risk, and rules on owning and selling exotic animals
vary by state and city.
"We have a policy that says don't buy these kinds of animals as
pets. This (monkeypox) is one example of why," Farinato says.
But even the critics aren't immune to the lure of exotic pets.
Osterholm several years ago let his teenage son buy an African
dwarf hedgehog, another pet fad - on condition that it be tested for
disease. Osterholm's laboratory found the animal harboured three
strains of salmonella never before seen in Minnesota.
They kept the hedgehog, but "extreme hand washing took place,"
Osterholm recalls. "It wasn't that fun."