031229 Wild Meat Imports Raise Concern

Atlanta, GA - Inspectors at Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson airport, suspicious of a smoky odor wafting from the suitcase of a passenger arriving from Cameroon in central Africa, peered into her bag.

They were shocked by what they saw -- an entire smoked monkey. The meat, the woman said, was intended for a traditional wedding reception of some African immigrants.

"It was obviously a monkey, but we couldn't identify the species," said Patricia Rogers, a federal wildlife agent at the airport.

In August, two large monkey heads seized from a passenger arriving in Atlanta from Senegal apparently were intended for consumption by immigrants, authorities said.

Airport inspectors from New York to Hawaii are reporting similar findings as a demand for "bush meat," or wild animal flesh, mostly from Africa, increases in the United States. "We're probably seeing only the tip of the iceberg," said Mike Elkins, deputy wildlife agent in charge at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's regional office in Atlanta.

That has worried public health officials. The wild meat, they say, could harbor deadly microbes that could cause epidemics in humans, from Ebola to AIDS. "It certainly poses public health risks," said Dr. Paul Argwin, a global health specialist with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A report in the Journal of the American Medical Association last year warned that many monkeys captured in Cameroon harbor a plethora of viruses that are close cousins of the AIDS virus. The microbes pose a major health risk to people who eat the animals, the report warned. Importation of non-human primates is prohibited under an international treaty.

This year, scientists linked the widespread consumption of wildlife in China to the outbreak of SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, a new and often fatal viral disease for humans that was rapidly spread by travelers from East Asia.

China, after tracing SARS to civet cats, in April banned the consumption and trading of wild animals in an effort to stop the disease's spread. But the restraints were eased in August to give economic relief to tens of thousands of vendors and restaurant workers put out of work by the ban.

Heightening U.S. concerns is an outbreak last spring of monkeypox, apparently from infected African rats. To guard against another outbreak, the CDC in June banned the importation of African rodents -- including rodent meat, popular as a delicacy among some immigrants.

Dangerous viruses can remain infectious in bush meat even after it is processed, the CDC warned: "Preparation methods such as smoking, salting, or brining may slow down bush meat's decay, but may not render bush meat free of infectious agents."

But even as the government intensifies efforts to curb illegal bush meat, smuggling of the illicit meat is rising, federal officials said.

In September, inspectors scrutinizing a Delta Air Lines cargo shipment found what they suspected was a commercial shipment of cane rat meat -- a favorite bush meat in central Africa -- labeled as "smoked fish," which are legal. The case is being investigated. Importing cane rat meat into the United States is prohibited because of monkeypox.

Random inspections of shipments coming into New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport resulted in 14 bush meat seizures in the weeks after the implementation of the African rodent ban last summer. One of those seizures included 600 pounds of rats, squirrels, bats and duiker, a small African antelope, from Ghana.

Driving the market is an unprecedented wave of immigrants from Africa, Asia and Latin America, authorities say. Immigrants who subsisted largely on bush meat and used it in cultural traditions want "a touch of home" when they move to the United States, said Sheila Einsweiler, chief of law enforcement for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Solid figures on the volume of bush meat entering the United States are hard to obtain. But wildlife authorities say they are probably intercepting only a fraction of what is coming in.

"The fact that bush meat (from Africa) is making it as far as the United States in large quantities is an indication of how dramatically commercialized it has become," said Heather Eves, head of the Bushmeat Crisis Task Force, set up in 1999 as an information clearinghouse for government agencies and organizations.

Public health issues aside, the bush meat trade also is devastating to African wildlife. In Central and West Africa, virtually every type of wild animal -- from cane rats and duikers to gorillas and elephants -- is hunted, frequently illegally, for food. As many as 5 million tons of bush meat are extracted from the basin each year, according to a report from the Zoological Society of London.

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