Yesterday, on Good Morning America, ABC took a look at the dangers posed by exotic pets. Instead of asking for a puppy for Christmas, Chris Cuomo explained, “more and more people are asking for things like iguanas and monkeys — exotic pets. And they’re being smuggled across the borders by the tens of millions, often bringing with them deadly germs that can infect their unsuspecting owners.”
The segment report was relatively unproblematic until near its end, when ABC’s Jeffrey Kofman noted a just-released CDC report that “estimates diseases that jump from animals to humans account for three-quarters of all infectious threats.”
Okay. But then, as unspecified footage of countless baby chicks rolled, accompanied by the words “ARE EXOTIC PETS DANGEROUS? DISEASE AND DANGER,” Kofman said this: “Some of the scariest and deadliest come from exotic animals — Asian bird flu, SARS, monkey pox.”
Added Heather Bair Brake of the CDC: “We don’t really know what can happen if we adopt some cute animal. We don’t really understand a lot of the diseases that are associated with these animals.”
This juxtaposition of chicks and dangerous exotic pets was at best confusing, and at worst misleading. Are countless Americans taking advantage of a black market for “exotic” baby chicks? Were the chicks on screen “exotic” because they were Asian? And what does that have to do with bird flu, which could spark the next influenza pandemic?
Given that it is television, ABC did not explain, so we’ll give it a shot. “Asian bird flu,” or the H5N1 virus, “has primarily stalked Asia,” reported the Associated Press, though this year “it crossed the continental divide, infecting people in Turkey, Iraq, Egypt, Djibouti, and Azerbaijan. But despite the deaths of 154 people, and hundreds of millions of birds worldwide dying and being slaughtered, the virus still hasn’t learned how to infect humans easily.”
The great fear is that a mutation of H5N1 will allow it to become easily transmissible between people, potentially resulting in a mild global pandemic along the lines of 1957 or 1968, or a severe one similar to 1918. (GMA viewers should also note that H5N1 has killed nearly 60 percent of the people it has infected thus far, making it much more deadly than SARS, which was frightening and economically costly, but carried a relatively low fatality rate of just under 10 percent.)
Yet to date, as another recent AP article noted, “most human cases have been linked to contact with infected birds.” And as Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, convincingly argued at a recent Nieman Foundation conference, it is Asia, where there are now more humans and poultry in close proximity than ever before, that remains the “genetic roulette table for H5N1 mutations.” That is where the next global influenza pandemic is likely to begin.
And if or when that pandemic arrives in America, the greatest threat will not come from poultry or baby chicks, but neighbors, co-workers and family members spreading the disease.
So ABC is right — you probably shouldn’t smuggle chicks from Indonesia into your home. But we have seen the “scariest and deadliest” infectious disease threat, and it is us.
Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.