We have met the enemy, and he is ours.We bought him at a pet shop.When monkey-pox,a disease usually found in the African rain forest , suddenly turns up in children in theAmerican Mid-west, it’ s hard not to wonder if the disease than comes fron for-eign animals is homing in on human beings.“Most of the infections we think of as human infections started in other animals,”says Ste-phen Morse, director of the Center for Public Health Preparedness at Columbia University.
It’ s not just that we’ re going to where the animals art; we’ re also bringing them closer to us .Popular foreign pets have brought a whole new disease to this country. A strange illness killed Isaksen’s pets, and she now thinks that keeping foreign pets is a bad idea. “I don’t think it’s fair to haoe them as pets when we have such a limited knowledge of them,” says Isaksen.
“Laws allowing these animals to be broukht in from deep for-est ares without stricter control need changing,” says Peter Scha-ntz. Monkey-pox may be the wake-up call . Researchers believe in-fected animals may infect their owners . We know very little about these new diseases. A new bug (病毒) may be kind at first . But it may develop into something harmful . Monkey-pox doesn’t look a major infectious disease . But it is not impossible to pass the disease from person to person.
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