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Agroterrorism
Illinois officials aim to make the state's
agriculture industry less vulnerable to attack
by Beverley Scobell
The threat is real. The potential targets are virtually unprotected. The weapon is low-tech and easily obtained.
Government officials in charge of food safety are hesitant even to talk about agroterrorism, a word that’s entered the nation’s lexicon only recently and one that represents a potential economic catastrophe for Illinois and other food-producing states. “The fact is, agroterrorism is a very real threat,” says U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin, “and if we’re talking about
contamination of our food supply, which is the worst possible threat, then we are,
at the least, considering the disruption
of the agricultural economy.”
An intentional attack on our food
system, whether foreign or domestic, could cause human deaths, but most
diseases that attack agricultural plants and animals aren’t directly harmful to people. That’s one reason why the
potential is alarming: No terrorist would have to become a martyr, just a little knowledgeable.
That vulnerability, along with others in the nation’s food system, is cited in a 2004 report, Hitting America’s Soft Underbelly: The Potential Threat of Deliberate Biological Attacks Against
the U.S. Agricultural and Food Industry, prepared for the Department of Defense by the Rand Corp., a nonprofit research organization based in Santa Monica, Calif. Author Peter Chalk writes that the United States “ignores the continuing vulnerability of the agricultural sector at its own peril.”
In Illinois, the summer fair season offers a “grand opportunity” for a
person bent on doing harm. Someone could “very easily produce a great amount of havoc,” says Dr. Gavin Meerdink, head of the toxicology lab
at the University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine. “You could walk in, sprinkle a little virus out of a tube here and there, walk out and never be caught.” Then fairgoers would head home, he says, carrying a disease that could take 48 to 72 hours to incubate and show symptoms. In that time,
animals could be miles away.
Agroterrorism’s greatest impact would likely be economic. Illinois has
1.4 million cows, more than 4 million hogs, 114,000 dairy cattle and 68,000 sheep and goats. The state generates nearly $7.5 billion annually in farm income, with the livestock industry
generating $1.6 billion in cash receipts.
State and federal agriculture officials say a serious threat, whether by accident or design, is
soybean rust, a naturally occurring disease found in other parts of the world. North American soybeans have no resistance, and
the U.S. Department of
Agriculture says in a January 2004 report that it’s only a matter of time before it crosses the nation’s borders.
Soybean rust could be used by terrorists to disrupt the economy if it were introduced before seed companies can develop a resistant strain. It spreads quickly in the wind and could be made into a low-tech biological weapon by simply rubbing the fungus on clothes and walking through unguarded fields.
In 2002, the latest figures available, soybeans accounted for $2.3 billion, or 30 percent, of the state’s cash receipts for commodities. Yet half of the soybean crop could be lost if the disease were introduced into Illinois farm fields, says Jeff Squibb, spokesman for the Illinois Department of Agriculture. And if products made from soybeans at food processing plants such as Archer Daniels Midland in Decatur are
included, the potential economic
damage multiplies exponentially.
Awareness of the vulnerability has prompted officials to put in place plans to deal with agroterrorism, including tests on a new tool that could improve the emergency response time.
Meanwhile, Meerdink says he’s
confident Illinois is prepared to handle an outbreak of animal disease. “As
veterinarians, we were concerned about foreign animal diseases decades before the term bioterrorism was heard.”
His Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory handles more than 40,000 cases a year, mostly routine analyses submitted by veterinarians. However, he says, they do see agents like aflatoxin and anthrax, considered bioweapons, which give
the staff “little scares” that hone the senses and provide a reminder to check preparedness.
“There’s just been an increased awareness that as we become a more global society — people travel internationally more often — there is a higher likelihood of a new disease being
introduced in the United States,” says Squibb. “Foot-and-mouth disease was one example that fortunately didn’t spread to the United States. Monkey pox last summer [did]. West Nile virus
is another example. There’s just an increased incidence in foreign diseases arriving, or threatening to arrive, in
our borders.”
As a result of that recognition, which preceded the attacks on September 11, 2001, the state ag department is preparing for potential threats to food crops and animals. In May, it completed a pilot program department officials could use to pinpoint every herd of cows, pigs, sheep and goats, as well as every agricultural resource related to each, such as veterinarians, possible evacuation sites for large herds of
animals and food processing plants.
The $22,000 federally funded project, an Internet-based geographic information system, focused on Clinton County because it ranks first for livestock sales and has the second-greatest number of hogs, says State Veterinarian Dr. Colleen O’Keefe.
The first of its kind in the nation,
the mapping project was developed through the Champaign office of
Science Applications International Corp., a contractor for several U.S.
government agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security.
The company’s experts incorporated agricultural information from all
available sources, including Moline-based John Deere Co., which has the largest agricultural database in the nation. The end product is a
3-D livestock emergency response tool that provides real-time information to the state ag department and the Illinois Emergency Management Agency, which houses the state’s Terrorism Task Force.
When Gov. Rod Blagojevich initiated the pilot project
last December, he said he would expand it to all Illinois
counties if it proves successful. State ag and emergency
management officials are
evaluating the results of
the trial run.
O’Keefe says she would look to the mapping to find a place large enough to take hundreds or thousands of animals if, for instance, there were a 1,000-pig production farm or several cattle herds feeding on grass near an area that could become contaminated.
But in the case of an intentional attack using a contagious disease
introduced into a herd, the damage
to animals could be magnified. “It is imperative that the state be able to
accurately locate animals at risk,
slaughter facilities and warehouses,
and be able to identify environmental concerns in case of an outbreak,” O’Keefe says.
That fear was heightened last
December when the first cow in the United States with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, commonly called
mad cow disease, was discovered in Washington state. Its introduction from outside the nation’s borders prompted policy-makers to question the food
safety net. Durbin, a member of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture, proposed legislation in
January that would strengthen livestock feed standards, improve surveillance
of suspicious outbreaks of neurological disorders in livestock and broaden
labeling requirements to make clear exactly what can and cannot be fed to livestock animals. The bill also would establish a national ruminant identification system to trace cases of brain
wasting diseases in humans and animals. These include Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, mad cow in cattle and
chronic wasting disease in deer and elk.
“Although just one cow within the U.S. has tested positive for mad cow
disease, according to the [Food and Drug Administration], the meat and meat by-products from that animal potentially contaminated 2.8 million pounds of meat, animal feed, cosmetics and other products by the time the recall order was issued,” Durbin said in a printed statement.
Chalk, the Rand report author,
points out that a pound of meat
generally travels about 1,000 miles before it reaches the consumer’s dinner table. Animals bought at auctions and cattle barns often cross several states within hours of leaving a sales yard. Tracking animals with contagious
diseases, therefore, is complicated by
the agricultural industry’s “distant and rapid dissemination of animals from farm to market.”
Another problem stems from the
industry's success at streamlining: Large farm operations with thousands of animals present a new set of
challenges. A disease, particularly one that is airborne, introduced at one of these facilities can infect or affect all the animals. In California in 2002, an
outbreak of exotic Newcastle disease led to the slaughter of 4 million chickens.
The fear of losing an entire flock or herd — or even the stigma of quarantine — can prevent farmers from reporting an illness immediately. Also, the size
of modern farms, which contributes to low-cost and plentiful food, serves to separate farmers from their livestock. Chalk contends that, without constant contact with individual animals, farmers may not notice an emerging disease until it has infected large numbers in a herd.
Meerdink of the U of I lab challenges that assertion, saying the operators of large farms watch production numbers closely and would readily recognize any problem within their herds. He says in the recent past Illinois has not seen a major outbreak of disease affecting large numbers of animals.
The Rand report offered several
recommendations for policy changes
to guard against an agroterrorism
threat, including standardizing
and streamlining food-supply and
agricultural-safety measures. But, it notes, that will require “active political input and commitment.”
Durbin, who is a proponent of
consolidating agencies that regulate the nation’s food supply, says President George W. Bush, as a candidate in 2000, came out for a single food agency. “We’re now in the fourth year of his presidency, and he’s not moved on it.
It is a big undertaking, and you have
to spend some political capital to make it happen.”
The U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention and the Department of Homeland Security all have laws,
regulations and guidelines to guard the farm-to-table food supply. These, along with other, minor bureaucracies, interact with their state counterparts.
State officials say most of the time — in normal mode — information flows smoothly between federal and state agencies. Other times, particularly in relation to food recalls, it has been
difficult to get answers quickly.
Durbin has introduced legislation to create a single national food agency that, he says, would bring together about a dozen federal agencies, 35
laws and scores of congressional
committees into one science-driven department that has consistent
standards.
“The cliches about food safety are almost laughable, were they not so
maddening,” says Durbin. “To have whole eggs inspected by the USDA;
broken eggs inspected by the FDA. Cheese pizza inspected by the FDA; pepperoni pizza inspected by the USDA. Animals inspected by the USDA; animal feed inspected by the FDA. The list goes on and on.” He adds that meat plants get daily inspections through the USDA, but meat product plants are inspected only once a year through the FDA. “One of them is right and one of them is wrong,” he says, “and there is no way to reconcile this crazy patchwork quilt.”
However, with reasonable scientific standards for food safety, the system could be simplified and made more understandable, he says. “In the age
of food security, which we’re now in,
this is essential.”
The Bush Administration’s 2005
budget proposal includes $65 million for the Food and Drug Administration to strengthen protection of the nation’s food supply. Another $264 million is for a “biosurveillance initiative,” enabling the departments of Health and Human Services and Homeland Security to detect and respond to bioterrorism.
And a $1.3 billion increase in spending will go to state, local and hospital
bioterrorism preparedness initiatives. The ag department is slated to get $10 million for food and animal surveillance.
Indeed, the Rand report points to
the elephant in the room, noting that considerable amounts of money have been devoted to defending against the relatively low-risk scenario of viral attacks aimed at human populations.
“By comparison, contingency
measures for livestock and crop
protection have attracted only limited support, despite the comparative ease
of carrying out such attacks and the implications they pose for the economic, social and political stability of the
United States.”
Illinois
Issues, July/August 2004
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