Inspectors at 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.
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“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 a family of immigrants, authorities said.
Airport inspectors from New York to Hawaii are reporting similar findings as demand increases in the United States for “bushmeat,” or wild animal flesh, mostly from Africa.
“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 public health officials worried. The wild meat, they say, may 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.
After tracing SARS to civet cats, China in April banned the consumption and trading of wild animals in an effort to stop the spread of the disease. But the restraints were eased in August to give economic relief to tens of thousands of vendors, restaurant workers and others put out of work by the ban.
A task force of World Health Organization scientists and Chinese researchers, through a letter to China’s top leadership, has called for greater government oversight of the wild animal trade.
Heightening concerns in the United States is an outbreak last spring of monkeypox, apparently brought into the country by infected African rats. To guard against another such outbreak, the CDC in June banned the importation of African rodents–including rodent meat, a delicacy among some immigrants.
Dangerous viruses can remain infectious in bushmeat even after it is processed, the CDC warned: “Preparation methods such as smoking, salting, or brining may slow down bushmeat’s decay, but may not render bushmeat free of infectious agents.”
Driving the market in illicit meat is an unprecedented wave of immigrants from Africa, Asia and Latin America, authorities say. Immigrants who subsisted largely on bushmeat and used it in cultural traditions in their native countries 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 bushmeat entering the United States are hard to obtain. But wildlife authorities say they are probably intercepting only a fraction of what is arriving.
“The fact that bushmeat [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.
“The trade has gotten so big that bushmeat can be easily obtained in many communities if you know who is selling it,” she said.
The substantial increase in bushmeat imports caught the government off-guard. Many airport inspectors are still inexperienced in recognizing the illegal meat. In addition, there are too few wildlife inspectors — 94 at 32 major U.S. airports, ocean ports and border crossings. Two inspectors are assigned to Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson, one of the world’s busiest airports.
Complicating the problem is confusion among federal agencies–including the Fish and Wildlife Service, the CDC, the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration–over which has jurisdiction over bushmeat shipments. Bureaucratic bungling has been blamed for allowing some suspicious shipments to slip by.
The agencies say they are working together to draw up guidelines and procedures that would facilitate interagency cooperation and prevent illegal bushmeat from entering the country.
Besides creating public health issues in this country, the bushmeat trade also is devastating to African wildlife. In forests throughout 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. The situation is especially dire in the vast Congo River basin. As much as 5 million tons of bushmeat are extracted from the basin each year, according to a report from the Zoological Society of London.
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“If no alternatives are found to the bushmeat crisis, it will spell extinction of most wildlife species [in the Congo basin] and result in a massive food disaster,” said Dr. Richard Carroll of the World Wildlife Fund, testifying before Congress this summer.
That’s especially true for chimpanzees and gorillas. Bushmeat hunters are killing 6,000 western lowland gorillas–of a population of fewer than 100,000–along with 15,000 chimpanzees per year, said Elizabeth Bennett of the World Conservation Society. Some of the great ape meat is even making its way to dinner tables in Europe, she said.