Disease hunter thwarts exotic pet outbreaks

Perfect conditions for a virus
What Carroll and Reynolds saw was the making of a perfect viral storm: There were different animals under stress in close quarters, creating the opportunity for viruses to jump.

The animals were quarantined. Later, Carroll and another CDC colleague headed to Texas to check on a wholesale exotic pet importer who had brought in about 800 African rodents. Some carried monkeypox.

The importer, Jeffrey Doth, would barely speak at first.

Doth had been busted in 1995 for smuggling five green tree pythons into the country by wrapping them around his waist under a large T-shirt. He was convicted in 2001, ordered to pay a $5,000 fine and sentenced to house arrest for several months.

At the time Doth imported the African rodents, his dealer’s license was revoked, Doth told The Associated Press recently in his first interview about the rodents.

Instead, he used the name of a customer’s company, he said.

Eventually, Doth warmed to Carroll and let him look at his records.

Doth explained that on April 9, 2003, a large shipment of African rodents — including Gambian rats, dormice and sun squirrels — arrived in Dallas aboard a commercial flight from Ghana. He told Carroll he noticed an “unusually large number of sick and dead animals.” Some of the larger animals had consumed the smaller ones.

Carroll said he was surprised to learn that no one ever checked the rodents for disease once they entered the country.

Fish and Wildlife Service inspectors did check the paperwork and look over the cargo. They are not required and not trained to check for disease.

During the monkeypox outbreak, the government banned African rodent imports. But rodents from other parts of the world are still allowed to enter — without any disease screening.

Painful symptoms
In the end, there were dozens of reported cases of monkeypox infection during the U.S. outbreak. At its worst, the disease caused fever, difficulty breathing, painful lesions and, in some, encephalitis.

No one died, but a 10-year-old suffered more than 100 lesions and spent days in a hospital isolation ward. Another person lost part of an eye from a lesion.

Though the outbreak was over, Carroll and others traveled to Ghana a year later to visit the exporter.

They had a long list of wild animal suspects that might be carriers of monkeypox — with Gambian rats near the top. But they needed proof.

Carroll trapped rodents in the same places where they had been captured and exported a year earlier, just before the outbreak.

He sent them back to his lab in Atlanta. A few tested positive for antibodies indicating that at some time in their lives they were exposed to monkeypox or its close relatives.

Before the CDC team left Ghana, the exporter told Carroll that Europe uses strict quarantines to catch diseased wildlife imports, making it expensive for both the exporter and importer.

“That’s why he loved to send animals to the United States, because he said there are no rules,” Carroll said.

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