The growing interest in the exotic pets such as Burmese python has raised scientists’ concern over public health security.
From 2000 to 2006, the US imported around 1.5 billion live animals from 190 countries, mostly for family pets, and 80 percent of them came from wild populations,according to the Science magazine.
Over 70 percent of the pets came from Southeast Asia, the well-known area for diseases such as scarlet fever, and they are likely carrying some strains which could lead to pandemics like swine flu.
Furthermore, if those invasive species escape to the environment, it costs millions of dollars to fix the disaster they could cause. European researchers estimated over US10 million dollars have to be paid for controlling an invasive species.
image source: discovery.com
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