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Perilous Pets
To many people, pets are like family -- but the increasing popularity of unusual species comes with danger. You might assume that "exotic" pets, such as rare birds, reptiles and furry prairie dogs, are safe if you get them from a certified breeder or pet store. But as one family discovered, some animals may carry a deadly virus.Like other three-year-olds, Schyan Kautzer of Dorchester, Wisconsin, occasionally had an unexplained fever. At first this one seemed like nothing serious, but on May 16, 2003, her temperature spiked to 103 degrees and stayed there. The usually buoyant girl seemed listless and weak. And when pus-filled blisters erupted on Schyan's skin, her mother, Tammy, 28, who keeps a menagerie of cats, dogs, goats and other animals on the family's 15-acre farm, thought about the cute little prairie dog she'd bought at a swap meet a few days before. One of its eyes had sealed shut, and it seemed sick. She'd warned Schyan not to play with it, but as the girl was putting the new pet into its cage, it nipped her right index finger and left hand.
A doctor at a local clinic said Schyan's bite wound was infected and prescribed antibiotics. By May 20, the blistering rash spread to Schyan's arms and scalp, then to other body parts. Her right eye, inflamed from rubbing, was swollen and runny. Two days later, the Kautzers drove 30 miles to Marshfield Clinic, which tested Schyan for every disease prairie dogs are known to carry. All came back negative. Meanwhile, the prairie dog that bit Schyan died. Fearing rabies, the vet sent its head to a state lab for testing; the results were negative. He also sent one of the animal's swollen lymph glands to Marshfield's pathology lab.
At the hospital, Tammy and her husband, Steve, kept a round-the-clock vigil in Schyan's room. "We cried," says Tammy. "And although I'm not a religious person, I prayed. The worst moment came when Schyan asked, 'Mommy, am I going to die?' Of course, I said no, but I was so afraid. All I could do was cry and sleep."
As dermatologist John Melski gently examined the virulent blisters on the girl's skin, he says, "All I knew for certain was that I didn't know what she had, so I had to keep looking." That meant a skin biopsy, and yet another painful needle poke. A pathology team, summoned on a Sunday afternoon, rushed to process the biopsy. By 9 p.m. they had eliminated a long list of possible suspects, including plague. "We strongly suspected a virus, but we didn't know which one," says Dr. Melski, who prescribed the antiviral drug acyclovir in the hope that it might help. The little girl also received fluids, breathing assistance, IV feeding and various medications to lower her temperature.
By May 26, Schyan was well enough to sit up in bed and eat. But the next day her mom came down with a fever, sweats and sore throat. She had the same telltale blisters clustered around a cat scratch that had allowed the virus to enter her. "She was delighted because we could do skin biopsies on her rather than on Schyan," saysm Dr. Melski. "I got more tissue to analyze with an electron microscope. That was the pivotal thing." On June 4 the high-tech images identified the pathogen as an orthopox virus, although they didn't know which one. Within days, pathologists at Marshfield and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pinpointed the culprit: monkeypox, a deadly but less contagious cousin of smallpox that had never been seen outside Africa.
"We live in a smaller, more dangerous world," says < Dr. Martin Blaser , president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. "A disease like monkeypox or West Nile virus can jump from an obscure village in Africa halfway around the world in a matter of days or weeks." Medical detectives traced the outbreak to infected giant Gambian rats imported from Ghana, which had been kept in a cage adjacent to a group of prairie dogs.
"We were lucky," says Dr. Melski. "The only people who got sick (72 suspected cases in six Midwestern states) had direct contact with a prairie dog or someone who had skin lesions." Except for a damaged tear duct (from rubbing her eye while infected), Schyan recovered completely and went home on May 29. Both her parents, who developed milder symptoms, improved quickly. The family and their pets remained under quarantine for several weeks. Acting jointly, the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration banned the import of all rodents from < Africa as well as the sale and distribution of prairie dogs.
"In hindsight, we learned valuable lessons," says Dr. Melski. "Given the world we've created, you can't dismiss the threat of an infectious disease no one has ever seen before. It could happen anywhere any day. And yes, next time it could be worse."
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