Experts warn of the next terror target: food supply

Nation vulnerable to deliberate spread of bacteria, viruses

By LANCE GAY

Scripps Howard News

NEW ORLEANS -- The FBI and federal agencies overseeing food safety issues are urging America's food manufacturers and processors to impose new farm-to-restaurant security procedures to thwart attacks by bioterrorists that could cripple the nation's food supply.

"The food supply is an obvious target -- we all have to eat," said LeeAnne Jackson of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's center for food safety and nutrition. "We need to raise the attention of the food industry to the possibility of terrorism."

She said information on spreading plant and animal diseases is already available on the Internet, including one "how-to" underground publication, "Silent Death," by the pseudonymous Uncle Fester, which once was a best-seller on Amazon.com.

But Jackson said potential terrorists don't need to go to the effort of making biological weapons because there's an ample supply of deadly cultures and viruses in often badly secured academic research laboratories that could also be stolen and used to spread diseases.

"Why we are concerned about food is that it has already occurred," she said, recalling the 1984 incident in The Dalles, Ore., when followers of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh spread salmonella on a salad bar, poisoning 750 people. More recently, 27 people at LaValle University in Quebec were sickened last year after arsenic was put in the veterinary laboratory's coffee machine.

Predictable: Craig Watz, director of the FBI's center for biological terrorism in Washington, told the Institute of Food Technologists convention meeting here this week that the current assessment of likely future terrorist attacks in the United States involves bombs and guns because they have more predictable effects.

But he told the industry that there are already worrying signs biological weapons are appearing more often in anthrax hoaxes and extortion attempts using threats of poisoning food. He said his office now handles 200 to 250 cases a year of possible biological terrorism, most of which turn out to be hoaxes.

"The biological arena is unpredictable," and terrorists could switch to spreading animal or plant diseases to undermine public confidence in the $18 billion food industry, and attempt to ruin America's economy. "The public panic is the goal," he said.

Scott Brooks, head of food safety for the Taco Bell restaurant chain, said there are simple security steps the industry can take to make terrorist attacks more difficult, from closing their processing plants to outsiders, to more closely checking everything that comes into their facilities.

"The weak underbelly is our food and water supplies," said Brooks, who formerly worked on a Pentagon program to secure the food supply for U.S. Air Force bases in the Middle East.

Sense of security: Roger Breeze, head of special research programs at the U.S. Agriculture Department's Agricultural Research Service, said Americans have been lulled into a sense of security because the two oceans have kept serious animal disease epidemics from coming to the United States.

Breeze said that shouldn't make the food industry complacent to what might happen if someone deliberately infected animals with a foreign disease. He noted England's beef and sheep industry has been devastated by a foot-and-mouth disease outbreak that brought agricultural shipments to a halt and resulted in killing more than 4.5 million head of livestock. The United States has more than 200 million cattle, hogs and sheep that would be vulnerable if the outbreak spread here.

"There are vulnerabilities" in the U.S. food supply chain, he said. "What we're doing here is trying to anticipate something will happen in the future."

Agriculture Department inspector general Roger Viadero said his office is also asking Congress this year to increase penalties for smuggling prohibited agricultural products into the United States.

He said he wasn't aiming at individuals who bring prohibited fruit or meat into the United States, but organized smuggling that could import exotic fruit flies that would devastate fruit farms from California's Central Valley to Georgia.

-- Anonymous, July 01, 2001

Answers

The Watchman Expositor

Guru Rajneesh Dead at 58

Controversial Indian Guru, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, "who turned a central Oregon town into a tumultuous commune of free love, hedonism and murder plots before being deported," died on Jan. 19th of heart failure in Poona, India. (Ft. Worth Star Telegram, 1/20/90).

Rajneesh captured the nation's attention in 1981 when he moved his ashram community and 93 Rolls-Royces to Antelope, Oregon and advocated "enlightenment" through sexual promiscuity. Oregonians were concerned when Rajneesh's followers, who outnumbered the permanent residents of Antelope, took over the small town changing its name to "City of Rajneesh." Critics charged that the Guru later tried to take over the county by bussing in street people gathered from the nation's inner cities to out-vote the regular citizens.

Ma Anand Sheela, the Rajneesh's personal secretary, later pled guilty to a number of charges including, "plotting to kill Mr. Rajneesh's physician with a poison-filled syringe and orchestrating a food poisoning outbreak that sickened more than 750 people in The Dalles, the county seat, as part of a plot to take control of the county," (Ibid).

The Bhagwan was also arrested and deported on charges of immigration fraud as part of a plea bargain arrangement with U.S. officials. He returned to his native India after unsuccessfully attempting to immigrate to several other countries.

Rajneesh's teachings included, "sex is fun, materialism is good and Jesus was a madman," and the claim that he was "the world's greatest lover." His "Bible" called, The Orange Book described a typical yoga session, "Explode! Go totally mad.... Jump up and down shouting the mantra `Hoo! Hoo! Hoo!' ...Each time you land on the flats of your feet, let the sound hammer deep into the sex center," (Ibid).

In 1988 thirty years after taking the title, "Bhagwan," (which means "the embodiment of God") Rajneesh admitted the title and his claim to be God were a "joke." "I hate the word... I don't want to be called Bhagwan (God) again. Enough is enough. The joke is over," stated Rajneesh saying he was really the reincarnation of Buddha and claiming for himself the new title of "Rajneesh Gautaman the Buddha," (Star Telegram, Dec. 29, 1988; Sec.1, p. 3). Later he took the title, "Osho Rajneesh," a Buddhist term meaning "on whom the heavens shower flowers." (Ibid, 1/20/90).

Thousands of the Guru's followers welcomed his death as "a liberation of the soul" and celebrations began in the Poona, India compound as soon as his death was announced.

-- Anonymous, July 01, 2001

This scares the crap out of me. Bombs I can handle, but someone messing with my food! YIKES! Some pretty sick minds out there that's for sure. The possibility of it not being discovered quickly is what gets to me the most.

I sure hope that I get that house, cause I'm gonna load up all those cabinets with food. (Heck - I may be able to fill most of it up already with my leftover stash! Still loving not having to go to the grocery for canned food!)

Where I work, as far as I know, they keep a really tight lid on all the nasty stuff, so I don't think someone could just walk out with it. Sometimes when I think about all the crap that is around me at work, I wanna quit.

-- Anonymous, July 01, 2001

I guess the only way to guard against this kind of terrorism is not to eat food for a couple of days after you buy it. Maybe also pull the package from the back of the shelf (which I do, anyway, for a longer sell-by date). You can grow your own, of course, but not many of us have the ability to provide all of our produce needs.

-- Anonymous, July 01, 2001

If memory serves me correctly, that salad bar was located at a well known supermarket chain in the Pacific Northwest. A couple weeks ago a pharmacy here in CA, mixed bacterial meningitis with cortisone. Several hundred people received the cortisone injections, and 5 people have died, and many are sick and hospitalized.

We only eat out when we have to travel, and I grow many of our fruits and veggies. The thought of food and water contamination scares the hell out of me.

-- Anonymous, July 01, 2001

Woman, 80, third victim of meningitis Link to pharmacy in Walnut Creek

Erin Hallissy, Chronicle Staff Writer Saturday, June 23, 2001

An elderly woman who received a tainted shot that caused meningitis died Thursday night and became the third fatality among the cluster of cases linked to a Walnut Creek pharmacy.

The woman, described only as being in her 80s, became seriously ill after getting a shot of betamethasone at Sierra SurgiCenter at John Muir Medical Center in May.

The betamethasone, a type of cortisone, was from a batch of medicine mixed by Doc's Pharmacy in Walnut Creek across from the hospital. The medicine was not properly sterilized and was contaminated with serratia bacteria, a common bacteria that can cause meningitis if injected in or around the spinal cord, health officials said.

The woman had been taken off life support about a day before her death, said Julie Freestone of the Contra Costa Public Health Department.

The victim's relatives asked John Muir officials not to release any information, including her name, age or hometown.

The first victim, George Stahl, 47, of Concord, died of meningitis on May 30, the day after he received a shot from the same batch of betamethasone. Health officials confirmed on June 12 that an unidentified elderly man who died soon after Stahl had also been infected with meningitis from the betamethasone.

The woman who just died and nine other people also contracted noncontagious meningitis. Laura Kaufman, a spokeswoman for John Muir Medical Center, said two remain hospitalized, both in good condition. The other seven patients have been released from the hospital.

"Hopefully, we're at the end of this," Kaufman said.

Freestone said the latest death does not mean that the meningitis outbreak is growing. She noted that the woman was in the same group of patients who received epidural shots at Sierra SurgiCenter between May 22 and 31.

"It's very tragic that she died, but as far as people being concerned -- there's nothing they should be concerned about that they haven't already heard, " Freestone said. "This is not an expansion. She was part of the initial group. "

State and local health officials have been investigating the outbreak and the practices at Doc's Pharmacy, which "compounds" or mixes some of its own medications. Dr. Wendel Brunner, Contra Costa's public health director, has said that the betamethasone was mixed by combining unsterilized powder with liquid and then sterilizing it in an autoclave.

It was contaminated either by improper sterilization or by being tainted when it was transferred into small vials for individual use.

Investigators from the state Pharmacy Board have turned over reports to the attorney general's office for review and for possible administrative proceedings.

-- Anonymous, July 01, 2001