09 June 2003

The Pox

It is Monday morning. It is drizzling again, very soft. The clouds are low and dark and pools of water have accumulated on the balcony. My sources tell me there was a hell of a thunderstorm last night and the humidity came in behind it. I don't know and can't testify to it. I was out in REM sleep when it came through. They say that this front is from the Gulf and our temperature will finally climb into the muggy upper eighties and hover there through the mid-week. I listen to the news. Another U.S. soldier was killed at a checkpoint, shot by undisclosed gunman. Somoni Sengupta wrote about rape as an instrument of ethnic conflict in the Congo. I read an article in the Time about an all-girl Muslim prom in San Francisco held to conform to the spirits of East and West, Britny Spears and disco lights meets the Hajib head covering.

As I read the BBC told me that Britain is wrestling over the great issue of discarding the Pound as the national monetary unit and joining all the wogs east of Calais in a central European currency. The North Koreans reportedly have "come clean" on their nuclear program, whatever that might mean, and are threatening (again) to develop a credible nuclear deterrent of their own. I stifle a yawn. The increased humidity made my sleep restive last night and the specter of the working week is looming in my mind. The Secretary is back and the Boss has requested an update on SARS and the Smallpox vaccination program. The former is being contained and the latter is dying. But there is another matter, another outbreak that the Secretary will want to know about.

It is another pox abroad in the land. This one is not so deadly as it cousin the Smallpox. This is a variant of the disease that presents itself as a fever and a rash. It is called the Monkeypox, because it sometimes kills them in Africa. But it actually spreads through rodents and it is in Wisconsin because of a strange niche market in pets. I am not kidding. This is pretty strange, so bear with me. It starts with rats and Prairie Dogs and cages and odd furtive men and smugglers. If this sounds a little like the slave trade, it is.

We have become a society of strange pleasures here in America. I remember the walking fish, a curious and voracious species that was released into the wild last year in Maryland. Somebody got tired of maintaining the aquarium at the house and dumped a silvery fish with a gaping maw and shiny teeth into a pond near the back yard. There must have been at least a pair of them, and for a precious few weeks the fate of the Chesapeake lay in the balance.

A year ago Anita Huslin wrote in the Post about the Northern Snakehead. Her lead caused chills all across the region with these words: "It grows to nearly three feet, eats whatever it wants, lives through icy winters,

survives oxygen-deprived waters, can crawl out of the water, wiggle across land, and survive up to four days."

They did everything but nuke the pond where the Snakehead was found, and in the end, the threat to the environment was eradicated. Unless it is still out there, lurking in the cold dank water. Looking for a mate. Maryland ponds have been much in the news of late, since someone tipped off the FBI that the "person of interest" in the anthrax mail attack might have used an underwater apparatus to package the leters and avoid being contaminated. They even found some gear that could have been used for just that when they drained a rural pool. They did not find any Snakeheads, for which I am grateful, but likewise no conclusive evidence about the anthrax. I don't know about you, but I am staying the hell out of Maryland until I am confident the situation has been thoroughly investigated and every pond drained.

Last Thursday there was a video conference and the matter of the Prairie Dogs and the Gambian pouch rat came up. It was a bit of a scandal. There had been several cases of people coming down with fever and generalized rashes. The doctors up in Wisconsin didn't report it, not right away, because the symptoms were not something they routinely encounter. According to the Times this morning the situation has evolved. There are reports now from three states, and the count of yesterday is now 23 cases in three Midwestern states.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention released an advisory yesterday, guaranteeing it would be in the Monday morning dump of news. Everyone who became infected had direct or close contact with ill prairie dogs. I don't know anyone who has had such contact, thankfully, but the press release noted that the rodents with the concerned look, erect posture and folded paws have become a fad in the exotic-pet market. The disease vector is reported to have been another exotic species, possibly the giant pouched rats from Gambia. I am trying to imagine the environment where these animals came together and I am left with an image of a paunchy man with a thin mustache and a line of cages. A smoker, probably.

Now for me the idea of having a giant rat as a pet is fairly close to desiring to possess a great silvery fish with gaping maw in an aquarium. But like I say, this is a nation with strange pleasures. I don't know what we are thinking about. But I am pretty sure that so long as we support furtive dealers with animals in cages and people who want Prairie Dog colonies on their sun porches and giant rats in their family rooms, we are in for more of this. Mixing populations of animals who were peacefully minding their own business on the other side of the globe probably isn't a good idea.

I could tell you the symptoms as a public service. But they are fairly gross. They include fever, headaches, dry cough, swollen lymph nodes, chills and drenching sweats. And more. But I won't go into them here. CDC is hoping the alert will prevent people from releasing sick animals into the wild, and I hope they are successful in that regard. There is enough stuff out there already.

And it is only Monday morning.