Posted on 06/15/2003 3:00:17 AM PDT by sarcasm
Gambia is a crooked finger poking into Africa's interior from the west coast, its central artery a river that nourishe
The tiny country is about 5,000 miles and an ocean away from the farm in central Wisconsin where 3-year-old Schyan Kautzer lives.
Now, a virus has brought them intimately close.
Monkeypox, a germ never before seen in the Western Hemisphere, globe-trotted to Schyan through a pet prairie dog her mother got at a local 4-H swap meet. The animal probably became infected when a dealer housed it with an imported Gambian giant rat and other African rodents he was selling.
As of Saturday, 88 potential cases were under investigation - 34 in Wisconsin, 33 in Indiana and 19 in Illinois, plus two in Ohio that may be linked to a kangaroo-like animal called a wallaby.
Like AIDS, West Nile fever, SARS and probably Ebola, monkeypox is caused by a virus that jumped from animals to people in the steamy jungles of Africa or remote regions of Asia long known as breeding grounds for novel strains of flu.
It's an emerging infectious disease, a term for illnesses caused by new germs or old germs in new places.
They're cropping up faster than ever before, the result of things we do and choices we make in our everyday lives that bring global germs to our doorsteps and transform ones that are already here into different and sometimes more deadly variations.
"Nothing that's been happening should surprise us," said G. Richard Olds, chairman of medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin and former head of the largest tropical disease and travel medicine center in New England.
"We do things as part of progress which we don't recognize as changing the microbial environment," like owning pets that days earlier were living in the wild, eating exotic foods and animals from other continents, and importing goods on vessels where mosquitoes and other creatures can stow away and establish footholds in the New World like modern-day immigrants.
"There are more of them because there are more of us going to where they are. We're picking them up and transporting them in ways that we couldn't before," said William Schaffner, chairman of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
Each new germ brings unique consequences.
SARS kills people in their prime, not just the elderly, and has affected world travel and commerce. West Nile virus has profoundly affected birds, killed about 300 Americans and left many others neurologically impaired since it first showed up in the United States in 1999.
Monkeypox would pose a great threat to wild rodents and rabbits if it were to spread to them. Although it hasn't caused any U.S. fatalities, the disease has killed as many as one in 10 who got it in Africa. It also brings more subtle woes, such as complicating efforts to detect and prevent bioterrorist attacks.
"This is another pustular disease that can mimic smallpox. It has the capacity to create more background noise, another disease that we have to learn to distinguish from smallpox," Schaffner explained.
Wisconsin is ground zero for the monkeypox outbreak, shattering notions anyone may have had that the Heartland is isolated from remote parts of the world and their problems.
"Nothing happens on this planet that doesn't impact us. We're wearing clothes that were made in China. We're eating foods that were grown in Chile," Olds said. "Could there be a more poignant example than this (monkeypox) happening in Wisconsin? People in Wisconsin don't even know where Gambia is."
The outbreak also illustrates how little many people understand about what truly puts them at risk of getting an infectious disease, public health experts say.
Many people were unaware of the dangers of having exotic pets as birthday party entertainment, owning tropical lizards or prairie dogs, or eating foreign fruits and vegetables.
It's natural for many people to crave the unusual, something different like an exotic pet, said Mike Hoffer, owner of Hoffer's Tropic Life Pets, a Milwaukee store involved in the monkeypox outbreak.
"That's human nature," he said. "It's why they change the style of a car every year and come out with new fashion colors every year for clothing."
Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, knows this from personal experience. His college-age son once brought home an African dwarf hedgehog, saying many of his friends had them and they were the rage.
Imported animals "end up going to a dealer's warehouse, a holding area where they're in contact with a lot of other animals. It passes through a system that mingles it with a lot of other animals from other continents. That system itself is like a grinder for infectious agents," Osterholm said.
To make the point about the risks the animal posed, he said he tested a single pellet of its stool and found three new strains of salmonella never before seen in Minnesota - novel germs that could potentially be introduced to a new location.
"The point being, most people have no sense of that whatever," he said.
"You can't expect them to know that" when they decide to buy such an animal, said Wisconsin's chief medical officer, epidemiologist Jeffrey Davis, "but it's exactly why it's wrong."
Buying an animal native to the U.S. is no protection, either, if the animal is wild rather than domestic, said the medical college's Olds. Prairie dogs, for instance, are known to carry bubonic plague and tularemia.
The prairie dog that infected Schyan is also thought to have infected 17 of the other 33 suspected monkeypox cases in Wisconsin, including people at two veterinary clinics where it was taken before it died.
"Do you realize these prairie dogs were wild less than a week before they were sold? They make it through the gray market with virtually little regulation. And then it's in the hands of a small child in a swap meet," Olds said. "What could possibly possess people to think this was a good idea?"
Even when people know things that put them at risk, they often fear them disproportionately or illogically, health experts said.
For example, many people fear insect repellents, which a large body of science supports as safe, more than the deadly mosquito-borne diseases they prevent.
"That's ridiculous," said Olds. "If you're afraid of insect repellent, stay inside."
Only time will tell the long-term consequences of monkeypox emerging in the U.S.
Little is known about the germ itself, because fewer than 100 human cases have been reported in Africa, where the germ was just discovered in 1970.
It is an orthopox virus, closely related but far less deadly than smallpox, said Robert Belshe, the St. Louis University doctor who led the government's tests last year of stockpiled smallpox vaccine, which is now being offered to people at high risk of being exposed to monkeypox.
"Persistent infection is not believed to occur," as it does with the virus that causes chickenpox, which remains in nerve endings and can cause shingles decades after the original pox infection, Belshe said.
Osterholm predicted that monkeypox will be of limited importance as a human disease.
"Its real significance is, it's hopefully a wake-up call about what can and will happen in the future" with globalization of germs, he said. "I for some time have said West Nile is a very serious issue, but it pales in comparison if Rift Valley fever or Japanese encephalitis were introduced into this world."
Strong efforts need to be made to keep monkeypox from being introduced into wildlife and becoming permanently entrenched in the U.S., said Mark Rupp, an infectious disease expert at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
"It was probably easier for a Gambian rat to get into the United States than a Gambian," Olds said.
On an individual level, people need to use common sense to avoid behaviors that put them and the public at large at risk, several experts said.
"Knowledge is by far the best weapon people have in understanding and preventing these illnesses," Rupp said. s lush rain forests on either side.
Ministers were warned of bush meat from Africa
MINISTERS were given warning nine months ago that meat from Africa being smuggled through Heathrow airport carried an "extremely high" risk of foot and mouth disease.
A letter sent to Nick Brown, the Agriculture Minister, last May voiced fears that passengers from Nigeria and Ghana were bringing in potentially infected meat, including entire butchered deer and dead monkeys, in their suitcases. The head of the company responsible for animal product shipments at Heathrow said last night that baggage handlers were refusing to touch luggage containing anteaters, tortoise legs, and maggot-infested fish.
With foot and mouth spreading to animal herds across the country, scientists have tried to identify the source of the outbreak. One suggestion is that the disease was present in meat products brought in unwittingly from outside Europe and possibly from Africa.
A dossier passed to The Daily Telegraph, including the letter to Mr Brown and graphic photographs of passenger bags filled with decaying meat and fish, has reinforced concerns that some flights arriving in Britain could pose a direct risk to animal and human health.
Although there is as yet no evidence that the current outbreak of foot and mouth was brought in from Africa, the revelations will heighten fears that British ports are incapable of preventing the entry of devastating diseases. Clive Lawrance, director of Ciel Logistics based near Heathrow, wrote to Mr Brown to warn that financial constraints and pressure to concentrate on collecting revenue meant the authorities were failing to take the problem seriously.
He told the Agriculture Minister: "The risk to the community is extremely high given that some of this product could contain disease, ie anthrax, foot and mouth, etc. Do I need to say more? Currently the general public are unaware of this risk. Whilst revenue collection is a high consideration, I have stated to the authorities that one outbreak of a serious contamination would be embarrassing to all concerned including you."
Mr Lawrance said last night that his letter was ignored by Mr Brown, but was passed on to Stella Jarvis, the senior surveyor of customs at Heathrow, who confirmed his concerns.
He said that after an inspection of a flight from Ghana in September, which resulted in nearly 1,400 kgs of meat being confiscated, police were called to intervene when passengers tried to prevent customs and MAFF officers from seizing their bags. The meat was for specialist markets. A spokesman for MAFF said: "We are aware that this is a recurring problem which we take seriously."
Why does england want these kinds of people in their country? My guess is that england let these people come in. Anyone who tries to bring in such stuff, should be forever banned from coming in to the country.
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