Plum Island NY--"Food Terrorism" to be studied

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New York Times, 9/22,99

U.S. Would Use Long Island Lab To Study Food Terrorism

By Judith Miller

PLUM ISLAND, N.Y. -- Alarmed at what the Clinton Administration views as the growing threat of biological terrorism to America's food supply, the Agriculture Department is seeking money to turn the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, one mile off Long Island, into a top security laboratory where some of the most dangerous diseases known to man or beast can be studied.

The Agriculture Department already operates here at Plum Island, just across Gardiners Bay from the wealthy Hamptons, a laboratory where such dreaded foreign animal diseases as foot-and-mouth and African swine fever are examined. But the department is seeking $75 million this year and $140 million over the next two years to upgrade the center to handle even more dangerous animal diseases that can affect humans.

While there are four civilian and military laboratories in America equipped to study such diseases -- technically known as Biosafety Level Four facilities -- their work is focused on germs that primarily affect humans, not domestic animals or plants.

Officials say the proposed expansion and upgrading of Plum Island is part of a new effort by the Clinton Administration to deter terrorists who might spread germs to destroy American crops or livestock for political purposes or financial gain, a threat they now see as equal to that of terrorist attacks aimed at people.

"Given the contribution of crop and animal exports to the nation's prosperity, we must do far more to protect our plant and animal resources," said Senator Richard G. Lugar, the Indiana Republican and co-author of legislation in 1991 and 1996 that provided money to bolster defenses against unconventional terrorism and stop the proliferation of such weapons.

"This is not about food per se; Americans would not go hungry if we were attacked," said Floyd P. Horn, the administrator of the Agricultural Research Service, who helped persuade the Administration to include his agency in January in its counter-terrorism plans and programs. "But such an attack, or even a credible threat, would severely disrupt America's economic and social infrastructure for weeks, if not months or years."

Plum Island, which was once operated by the United States Army Chemical Corps, was designated as an animal-disease research center and transferred to the Agriculture Department in the early 1950's. It is already what scientists call an agricultural "Biosafety Level Three" center, which means that its containment areas, which hold germs dangerous to animals, have filtered air, sealed doors and negative air pressure that prevents germs from leaking out of the labs. Liquid waste is decontaminated.

All who enter the labs wear white lab coats and slippers. After leaving the containment areas, they are required to shower, shampoo their hair, scrub their nails and rinse their mouths, since lethal germs can live in human throats and infect animals up to two days later. To stop viruses or microbes from escaping to the mainland, no clothing or articles, even eyeglasses, are permitted to leave the labs without being soaked in disinfectant, said Dr. Alfonso Torres, the deputy administrator of the Agriculture Department's Veterinary Services Division and former director of the center, who conducted this reporter on a tour.

The building's perimeter is also tightly guarded. While Dr. Torres declined to discuss specific security measures, the shores of this pork-chop-shaped, 840-acre island are said by Federal officials to be monitored by electronic sensors and patrolled by boats and helicopters. Once a year, deer and other animals that have swum across to the island are killed in what island officials call a controlled hunt.

Despite an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease on the island in 1978, which led Plum scientists to abandon their holding areas for large animals, "there has never been a leak of a dangerous pathogens to the mainland from Plum Island," Dr. Torres said.

Moving to the next level of bio safety would require that scientists working with dangerous pathogens wear the protective decontaminated suits portrayed in movies like "Outbreak," and breathe only filtered air pumped into their hoods. Such precautions would allow scientists to work with even more dangerous animal pathogens that can affect humans, like the Hendra virus, which afflicts horses, and the Nipah pig virus, named for the Malaysian village in which it was first isolated this year. The virus has already killed more than 100 people.

"We intend to work closely with local officials and community groups to allay any concerns about safety," said Dr. Horn, who acknowledges that Plum Island has long been shrouded in mystery and plagued by what he and Dr. Torres call unfounded rumors and fears.

The 850-acre island was opened to news organizations only in 1992 in response to concerns about safety at the center. In 1995, the Department of Agriculture was fined $111,000 for illegally storing hazardous chemicals here.

Since then, the agency has changed the contractor who operates the island, and there have been no violations.

The extent of the threat posed by agro-terrorism remains in dispute, even within the Clinton Administration. Some scientists and terrorism analysts argue that there is little reason to believe that terrorists would attack American agriculture or livestock.

But intelligence reports increasingly conclude that several countries, including Iraq, have developed germs to attack the food supplies of their adversaries. And senior American officials now believe that an outbreak of screwworm, a parasite that afflicts animals and people, was spread deliberately 14 years ago in Mexico less than 50 miles from the Texas border by workers who were employed in a screwworm eradication program and feared the loss of their jobs.

Although no one was ever arrested or charged in the incident, John Wyss, an Agriculture Department veteran of 25 years who supervised the project from Washington, said that the agency's investigations showed that the outbreak, given its nature and location, had to have been deliberate.

In recent interviews in Russia and Kazakhstan, former Soviet scientists also disclosed that they had developed weapons specifically aimed at crops and livestock. Sadigappar Mamadaliyev, the director of the Scientific Agricultural Research Institute, now in the Republic of Kazakhstan, said that in Soviet times, his was one of four centers dedicated to developing lethal germs as weapons against foreign crops and animals.

"The Soviets here concentrated on cow and sheep pox and blue tongue," he said. "We also cooperated closely with the All-Russian Institute of Animal Health in Vladimir, Russia, which worked on foot-and-mouth disease, and with the Pokrov Institute of Veterinary Virology, which specialized in African swine and horse fevers."

Dr. Mamadaliyev said he had more than 200 strains of dangerous animal pathogens at his institute, whose former scientific staff of 150 has shrunk by half from budget cuts and which is struggling to survive.

There were more than 10,000 Russians working on plant and animal pathogens in the former Soviet germ warfare program, said Ken Alibek, a senior germ researcher who defected to the United States in 1992 and who recently wrote a book, "BioHazard" (Random House), in which he describes the vast scale and depth of the Soviet Union's illegal germ offensive warfare program. Many of those scientists are now without jobs.

Several Russian scientists said that Iranians had visited their institutes, some offering huge salaries to work in Teheran and specifically expressing interest in research on animal and plant microbes.

Fueled by growing concern about the proliferation of such expertise and such dangerous germs, President Clinton ordered the Government last year to prepare defenses against germ and other unconventional attacks on the nation's plants and animals. In January, Dr. Horn recruited four former Pentagon intelligence analysts and terrorism experts to form the Agricultural Research Services' first unit to evaluate such threats. In April, the White House formally included the Agriculture Department in the group of agencies that meet regularly under National Security Council aegis to weigh plans to deter or respond to unconventional terrorism, a $2.8 billion effort.

At a public meeting in September in Washington, Dr. Horn discussed his concern about the nation's growing vulnerability to agro-terrorism, mentioning his desire to upgrade Plum Island and make it a centerpiece of the Government's effort to protect the nation's food supply.

Senator Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas, who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, plans to hold hearings on agro-terrorism in October that will explore the Administration's plans for Plum Island.

Plum Island has 300 employees, 60 of whom are scientists, 70 buildings, many of them closed or deteriorating, independent power and water treatment plants, and a fleet of four boats. Dr. Torres calls the $14.5 million that the Government spends a year on Plum Island a "small investment" in the nation's food security given the $140 billion earned from commodities exports.

As disease after disease has been eradicated, Dr. Torres said, Washington has reduced the budget for veterinary services, which now stands at $116 million a year. Yet demand keeps growing. Agriculture scientists now conduct about 500 investigations of foreign animal diseases a year, more than half of them in birds brought back to the country by the millions of American travelers each year. "Our emergency response systems are becoming very, very thin," Dr. Torres said.

David R. Franz, a vice president of the Southern Research Institute and former director of the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, a Biosafety Level Four center, maintains that recent changes in the structure of American agriculture have heightened vulnerability. Increased trade and international travel, reduced genetic diversity in farm animals and the high concentration of animals in yards have increased the risk that highly infectious diseases will emerge and spread, "be they naturally or deliberately introduced, " Dr. Franz said.

The changing nature of terrorism also heightens the threat, says Thomas W. Frazier, president of a consortium of private companies called GenCon.

"There are now hundreds of attacks a year on agricultural targets in the United States, Canada and Britain as a form of violent protest by extremist environmental protection or animal rights groups," he said. Plus, the nation's intelligence analysts expect increased assaults by state-sponsored bioterrorists, militant religious cults and other extremist groups on such targets as food and agriculture.

The largest animal disease outbreak in America in recent history, wrote Corrie Brown, the head of the pathology department at the University of Georgia's College of Veterinary Medicine, was one caused by avian influenza that erupted in Pennsylvania some 15 years ago. A deadly viral variant spread quickly, prompting Agriculture officials to kill all exposed chickens at a cost of $63 million to the Federal Government. Economists estimated that had they not been killed, the cost to United States agriculture would have been as high as $5.6 billion. Even so, Dr. Brown concluded, the six-month outbreak caused poultry prices to rise by $349 million.

-- (Paracelsus@Pb.Au), February 08, 2001


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