As public health agencies scramble to contain the monkeypox outbreak that has infected about 10,000 Americans, the federal government has done nothing in response to how the virus first arrived in the United States 19 years ago.

Ann Linder, a wildlife research fellow at Harvard Law School’s Brooks McCormick Jr. Animal Law & Policy Program, studies zoonotic diseases — those that can pass between animals and humans.

Monkeypox, she recently wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle, first was detected in the United States in Wisconsin in 2003. Before that, it was unknown outside western and central Africa.

A 3-year-old girl, who had been bitten by a pet prairie dog that her mother had bought from an exotic animal dealer, exhibited a high fever, a severe rash and pustules. Soon afterward, the prairie dog died and the girl’s mother and the animal dealer became ill with the disease.

Investigators discovered that the dealer had held a group of prairie dogs in the same area as pouched rats imported from Ghana, West Africa, from which they acquired the virus. Eventually, 71 people were known to have acquired the disease, 18 of whom were hospitalized.

As demonstrated by avian flu, swine flu, COVID-19 and other diseases, zoonotic viruses are a major public health threat. Yet the federal government does little to thwart exotic pet imports.

Congress should ban the importation and sale of any species known to have harbored a harmful virus that can be passed to domesticated animals or humans.

— The Citizens’ Voice, Wilkes-Barre via TNS