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CDC, LI experts warn of threats
from exotic pets BY DELTHIA RICKS | December 17, 2007 As he descended the stairs into the basement of what should have been an average middle-class home, Roy Gross, an expert in capturing wild animals in supposedly civilized places, was convinced he had entered a dark Brazilian rain forest. "There were plants and jungle sounds," said Gross, chief of the Suffolk County Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, describing the monkey hoots and twitterings of exotic birds. But the recorded sound effects were no match for the actual inhabitants - snakes, iguanas and host of other reptiles - in this makeshift slice of the Amazon stuffed in a Lindenhurst house. "I looked up, and just above my head in this Plexiglas container was a 6-foot alligator," Gross said. He and his fellow animal rescuers are being kept busy because of a surge in exotic pets. The trend also has captured the attention of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one of the agencies charged with overseeing the importation of animals that might pose a disease threat. Dr. Nina Marano, chief of the CDC unit dealing with traveler health and animal importation, said reptiles can carry salmonella; mammals a host of viral, bacterial and parasitic organisms. "The pet-owning public wants to be able to own the latest, newest, most exotic thing," she said. "But we want people to understand the risks that some animals pose." Marano and two colleagues authored an editorial last week in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, citing what they called the staggering magnitude of the global animal trade. In terms of sheer numbers, 37,858,179 individually counted live amphibians, birds, mammals and reptiles were imported to the United States from 163 countries between 2000 and 2004, the most recent years for complete statistics. These imports included Asian macaques, South American rodents and African great cats. Gross said exotic animals also have captured the interests of drug lords. At one house where he made a rescue a few years ago, drug dealers guarded their cache with two 15-foot Burmese pythons. Marc Morrone, owner of Parrots of the World in Rockville Centre, believes people who seek out exotic animals are disregarding their welfare. "There is nothing desirable about these animals as pets. People want them because they're illegal and it makes them feel like they've beat the system." The translocation of animals from one habitat to another poses two kinds of threats, Marano said. Pet pythons released into wetlands can become unchecked predators, and other animals can introduce infectious organisms to regions where they didn't previously exist. Dr. Paul Arguin of the CDC said a 2003 monkeypox outbreak in the Midwest occurred because of two exotic pets. Some people had become smitten with prairie dogs. Others were swooning over the giant Gambian rat, an African rodent that carried the monkeypox virus. Prairie dogs apparently caged near the rats caught the virus, leading to a multistate outbreak in which humans and prairie dogs were sickened. Marano now wants officials to consider banning South American rodents because they may harbor hemorrhagic fever viruses. "There can be a new demand for a new animal just because people decide it's particularly cute," Arguin added. "You can go from importing five to importing 50,000 in no time." Interstate animal transportation also plays a role in infections. A strain of the rabies virus that once was seen only in the Southeast arrived in the Northeast, Arguin said, after people started translocating - for unknown reasons - southern-born raccoons. Now the strain is widespread along the Eastern seaboard. Gross attributes the rise in exotic pets to a simple human urge: "It's impulse buying. Alligators are illegal in New York, but you can go to Pennsylvania and legally buy one. Some people think, "Oh, that's cool." But gators have rapid growth rates and quickly lose their appeal, he said, leading people to dump them in the nearest waterway, where they pose a threat to children and to the ecology. http://www.newsday.com/news/health/ny-hspets175504518dec17,0,6758175.story |
