How Illegal Items Are Found And Destroyed At JFK Airport - Interesting

New York's JFK airport handles a lot of international flights, about 43,000 people enter the US through this airport every day! Terminal 4 alone handles approximately 1000 passengers an hour, and that's a lot of people, and, a lot of people means, a lot of luggage! Not everything inside that luggage can be legally brought into the country though so all bags have to be checked for contraband. While people do attempt to bring illegal narcotics through terminal 4 it is not the most common form of contraband nor is it the most dangerous. The most damaging form of contraband is actually food and plants that can introduce harmful insects or bacteria into the ecosystem.

In order to quickly check the vast amount of luggage that enters JFK every day, the airport has various systems in place, and perhaps one of the most important are the sniffer dogs and these dogs are trained to react passively, when they smell narcotics they just sit down by the case that contains them, however, narcotics aren't the only things that dogs can be trained to distinguish, and for detecting undeclared food and plants, the Customs and Border Protection officers also use dogs.

A human nose has around 5 Million scent receptors, a dog's nose, depending on the breed, can have up to 300 million, and up to 40% of its brain is used for processing the information they receive. This means that whereas a human, in perfect conditions, can pick up a scent from hundreds of meters away a dog can do it from over 12 miles away (20km).

The reason why it's important for people to declare any food they have with them or for the authorities to catch anyone who doesn't declare it is because the introduction of invasive species costs billions of dollars in agricultural losses and control methods a year, not to mention lasting damage to ecosystems and the eradication of indigenous wildlife.

The Asian Citrus Psyllid was first detected in Miami in 1998 and was probably brought in from Asia by boat. The Asian Citrus Psyllid carries a very harmful bacteria with it that destroys citrus trees. Since 1998, it has spread across the whole country, and now over half of Florida's trees are infected and it has also been detected in Georgia, Texas, and California. The Asian Long-Horned Beetle has caused so much damage to hardwood trees in New York, Ohio, and Illinois that over half a billion dollars have been spent trying to eradicate it. The Brown Marmorated stink bug damages food crops and infests people's homes and because in the US it has no natural predators its population growth rises unchecked. Cogongrass entered the US as seeds in packing material and is displacing native plants in the southeast and increasing the risk of wildfire because it burns quicker and hotter than native grasses. The list of inva ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dw667hzROjc