African Bushmeat Is Ebola's Back Door to America
While the focus remains on the passengers of trans-Atlantic flights, there is an additional risk—all but ignored by the popular press and public—lurking in the cargo hold below: bushmeat contaminated with the Ebola virus and smuggled into the U.S. in luggage.
A bowl containing cooked monkey bushmeat makes its way to the local Nayabissam market on July 27, 2011 in Nayabissam, Cameroon.
Jonathan Torgovnik/Getty
That Special-Occasions Meat
Under U.S. Department of Agriculture rules,
not a single African country is allowed to import any meat product, raw
or processed. And for years now, U.S. health officials and legislators
have been expressing concern
over the steady flow of bushmeat illegally imported into the country.
Internal documents show that from 2009 to 2013, the U.S. Customs and
Border Protection agency confiscated over 69,000 different bushmeat
items, with seizures ranging from dried bat to smoked monkey (see
sidebar). And that’s likely a mere sliver compared with what actually
gets into the U.S. At least one estimate puts the number at 15,000
pounds every month.
“Nobody knows” how much of the stuff
gets into America, says Allard Blom of the World Wildlife Fund. “It’s
anybody’s guess, really, because there’s very little control on the
import of bushmeats. You’re looking here particularly at Fish and
Wildlife Service [FWS], and they have very few agents that are working
at these airports, and very few pieces of luggage are actually
screened.”
Via email, an agency spokeswoman says, “It’s misleading to cite only Fish and Wildlife Service staffing levels.”
Three other agencies are responsible for enforcing import restrictions, according to the FWS: “Bushmeat as meat is also regulated on import by the Food and Drug Administration (from a human health perspective), Centers for Disease Control (from a human health and primate perspective) and USDA (from an agricultural perspective concerned with animal diseases).” Customs, which works under the Department of Homeland Security, is responsible for coordinating these four agencies. The inadequate enforcement could be a function of this diffusion of responsibility, or there might be “questions about what exactly is legal and what is not,” says Blom. In other words, customs agents may simply not recognize what they are looking at when encountering bushmeat.
“I’ve seen bushmeat being brought into the
U.S. in basically big suitcases of smoked meat or coolers brought on
planes,” says Blom.
Back in the Bronx, Appiah confirms
that plenty of the stuff gets past the gatekeepers. “Immigration in
America is trying to control it…but always they find a way of bringing
[bushmeat] in here,” he told Newsweek in his thick accent, adding, “It’s all around.”
New
York City, home to nearly 77,000 West Africans (most of them in the
Bronx), is the epicenter of the bushmeat trade in the U.S. There are
very few direct flights from West Africa to the U.S.; the majority of
travelers first pass through Western Europe before connecting to New
York. One recent study
estimated that 273 tons of bushmeat is imported into Charles de Gaulle
Airport on Air France carriers every year. From France, the imported
goods often travel on to America.
Smuggling continues to
grow because bushmeat is prized, and increasingly valuable. According
to a 2002 congressional hearing, the total value of the bushmeat trade
had “reached the staggering level of more than $50 million annually and
potentially could grow to hundreds of millions of dollars in the next
two decades.” Because of the illegal nature of the bushmeat trade,
precise data are not available. However, as the number of African-born
immigrants in the U.S. has grown in the past decade, it’s likely that
the trade has increased.
Bushmeat is also associated with magical and medicinal properties—in 1999,
two researchers in Nigeria examined the stalls of dozens of traders in
traditional medicine ingredients and found 45 different animals for sale
(living or dead), including primates, bats, great cats (lions and
leopards) and the aforementioned cane rat. In some parts of Western
Africa, large quantities of bushmeat must be served to the participants at circumcision ceremonies.
Bushmeat is, for many West Africans, a cultural
touchstone. Liberian expat Edward Lama Wonkeryor, a professor of African
American Studies at Temple University, told The New York Times
that back in the 1970s his mother used to sneak cuts of smoked monkey,
bush hog or lion into his suitcase before he returned to the U.S. after a
visit home. He would save them for special events, like weddings and
christenings.
That Most Dangerous Meat
Though researchers cannot identify with absolute certainty the cause of the current Ebola outbreak, they do know the strain of virus, while being similar to the Zaire strain, is indigenous to Guinea, suggesting bushmeat was the source.
Fruit
bats are believed to be the “natural reservoir” of Ebola (meaning the
virus can live in the bats for years without harming them), and
scientists presume the virus makes its way into primates and other
animals when they eat fruits half-eaten by and contaminated with the
saliva of these bats. From those infected animals, the virus jumps to
humans.
“Just under 50 percent of Ebola outbreaks have been due to known handling of primate, great ape carcasses,” says Michael Jarvis, a virology and immunology expert at Britain’s Plymouth University.
“Just under 50 percent of Ebola outbreaks have been due to known handling of primate, great ape carcasses,” says Michael Jarvis, a virology and immunology expert at Britain’s Plymouth University.
The
most likely scenario for the jump is when an infected animal is being
butchered and blood seeps into a cut on the hunter’s (or butcher’s)
hand. “But we don’t know precisely,” says Dr. George Amato, director of
the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics at the American Museum of
Natural History. Amato adds that it’s also very possible that eating
infected, improperly prepared meat could spread Ebola.
Fruit
bats and primates are two common forms of bushmeat consumed every day
by people in Africa, and by those Africans living in the U.S. who have
managed to find an illegal supplier.
In a 2012 study, researchers working with government officials at John F. Kennedy Airport in the borough of Queens, New York (and some smaller airports) tested confiscated bushmeat, including baboon, chimpanzee, mangabey, guenon, green monkey and cane rat. They found that the meat does not arrive alone; it carries with it many unseen microorganisms.
Smoked
bushmeat may appear safe, but the flesh inside is still juicy—filled
with blood, fresh tissue and more: Simian foamy virus and herpes viruses
showed up in the samples of the confiscated meats. The researchers
didn’t find Ebola, but they tested only a few samples.
Cooking
meat thoroughly will generally kill all pathogens, including viruses
and bacteria, but most of the bushmeat arriving in the U.S. has been
just barely processed in order to keep it from rotting while being
transported. “If you wanted to safely transport meat and not worry about
pathogens, you wouldn’t smoke it,” says Amato. “It’s not a very
efficient way of killing microorganisms.”
In addition,
bushmeat may serve as a potential route for other diseases, “especially
some of the livestock diseases, [like] hoof-and-mouth and African swine
fever. Those can survive a very long time in a piece of meat,” says Bill
Karesh, one of the authors of the 2012 study and a public health policy
expert at EcoHealth Alliance. These and other pathogens could present
dangers equally—or more—frightening than an Ebola outbreak.
Newsweek
Viral Chatter Goes Viral
In
a 2007 report, the World Health Organization warned that infectious
diseases are now emerging at a rapid and previously unseen rate. New
viruses and bacteria keep appearing, while familiar pathogens,
previously thought to have been suppressed, reemerge. These old viruses
and bacteria either change genetically, re-combine with other pathogens
or adapt in a way that fools our immune systems, becoming newly
empowered to ruin our bodies. Such was the case with the swine and bird
flu outbreaks of the past decade.
Nearly 75 percent of
these emerging infectious diseases come from animal species, and of
those, the majority were in the wild. Better prediction and prevention
of these emerging diseases requires closer monitoring of individuals who
have a lot of contact with bushmeat to look for what Dr. Amesh Adalja,
of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Center for Health
Security, calls viral chatter.
Viral chatter, he
explains, occurs when viruses jump from wild animals into people. Though
it may feel as if viruses attack humans en masse in one big offensive,
what’s really happening is a series of ongoing, tentative incursions.
During these incursions, the viruses can mutate, becoming more easily
transmitted, more deadly or both. Not every new virus we see in humans
will cause sickness or symptoms, but by monitoring viral chatter, we
could potentially uncover trends that might help prevent the spread of
future viruses that do cause sickness, or worse.
If
scientists had been monitoring viral chatter in the past, one tragic
public health story may have developed quite differently. Human
immunodeficiency virus (HIV) almost certainly was transferred from
bushmeat. “We have an awful lot of evidence [that] this virus moved from
chimpanzees to people,” says Amato. “The most likely way that move
happened was because people ate chimpanzees.”
Epidemiologists believe that HIV is a descendent of simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), which is found in primates like the sooty mangabey, which is indigenous—and hunted—in Western Africa. The virus likely began to infect humans first as SIV, then slowly gained the mutations that led, ultimately, to the shift to HIV.
“If people were
monitoring these bushmeat hunters in Cameroon in the early 1900s, you
might have seen SIV jumping into them before it became HIV,” Adalja
says.
Such global viral forecasting is even more
important today. With people traveling far and wide—and bushmeat
reaching certain regions of the globe for the first time—more
opportunities exist for the spread of viral diseases. “The perfect
example is China, where they’re harvesting lots of wildlife of all
kinds, they’re storing it all on top of each other in warehouses and
markets,” says Amato. “You’re sort of creating this very strange
evolutionary environment where pathogens and other microorganisms that
never would come into contact with each other are coming into contact
with each other.”
These environments can encourage
what’s called horizontal gene transfer, where genes from one virus move
into another virus when they are infecting the same organism. In the
most frightening type of horizontal gene transfer, a robust but harmless
virus could transfer its genetic propensity for resilience to a deadly
but fragile virus, creating some new supervirus that might lead to a
SARS-like epidemic. It’s no coincidence that the 2002-2003 SARS outbreak
was born in the live animal markets of southern China; the virus
originated in bats, where it would have stayed permanently, except for
the fact that in the markets infected bats were kept in cages near
civets (a small cat-like mammal). Humans didn’t eat the bats, but they
did eat the civets. And at some point the disease moved from bat to
civet to human, acquiring mutations along the way that enabled it to
infect over 8,000 people in 37 different countries.
Cutting the Roots
Last
month, when news of the Ebola outbreak began to pick up steam, Appiah
returned to his native Ghana to gather up his three children (including
Princess, who was with him when we spoke) who were still living there
and then hurried back to the Bronx.
“I just brought all my kids here…because it’s dangerous,” he tells Newsweek.
“You can’t put trust in West African government to combat diseases.”
Although no cases of Ebola have been confirmed in Ghana, Appiah isn’t
taking any chances, with Liberia (which has 166 confirmed cases as of
this writing) and Guinea (369) just a few hundred miles away.
Meanwhile,
demand for bushmeat in Appiah’s neighborhood has “drastically dropped,”
he says because of the growing fears surrounding the Ebola outbreak.
“Now when you go to the African market and you ask, they don’t have it,”
he says. He recently decided to cut out his favorite ethnic dish from
his diet.
In the Bronx and other parts of the city with large enclaves of West African immigrants, Newsweek could
not find bushmeat for sale. Targeting small merchants, however, will
not stem the illegal bushmeat trade or the potential spread of diseases
like Ebola. Instead, the commercial trade in Africa must be curbed,
which will require greater action and cooperation from African
governments and increased international efforts—a daunting task,
considering how popular bushmeat is on the continent.
Appiah tells Newsweek that
when he was last in Ghana, he tried to warn people of the dangers of
bushmeat. But he found that the locals, even when they understood the
grave risk, ignored his advice.
“They don’t have an alternative,” he says. “They have to eat.”
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