High-Impact Terrorism Proceedings of a Russian-American Workshop (2002) / Chapter Skim
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Agricultural Bioterrorism
Agricultural Bioterrorism
Pages 219-232
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From page 219... ...
It is the necessary responses to agricultural disease to contain and clean up, to prevent further spread, and then to reclaim the previous level of disease control or freedom, lost exports, and international recognition that eat up effort and funding. There is a very different time scale and series of available tools than those involving public health and human biological attacks.
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From page 220... ...
According to the Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute Web site: i · The United States, during the days of its offensive biological warfare program (1943-1969) , investigated agents of anthrax, brucellosis, Eastern and
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From page 221... ...
worked with African swine fever, anthrax, avian influenza, brown grass mosaic, brucellosis, contagious bovine pleuropneumonia, contagious ecthyma, foot-and-mouth disease, "landers, maize rust, Newcastle disease, potato virus, psittacosis, rice blast, rinderpest, rye blast, tobacco mosaic, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, vesicular stomatitis, wheat and barley mosaic streak, and wheat stem rust. They also experimented with parasitic insects and insect attractants.
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From page 222... ...
Beef production has followed the same trend, with 120,000 feedlots in 1970 and only 43,000 in 1988. Today's processing plants operate at extremely high volume: a plant that produces ground beef may produce 4 to 12 tons per hour and operate on a 20-hour day.
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From page 223... ...
Strangely, as the world has grown richer, farming more intensive and agricultural research more sophisticated, we have concentrated food production on just a few varieties. Ninety-five percent of the world's calories now come from only 30 crops, and fifty percent from just four: rice, maize (corn)
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From page 224... ...
With plants, thousands of acres of crop plants may have to be destroyed to contain an outbreak. Thus, the losses attendant on outbreak control can exceed, often by several orders of magnitude, the direct losses due to the disease itself.
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From page 225... ...
Losses due to indirect effects (market destabilization, etch. The substantial market effects of a widespread outbreak, or one that has major impacts on international trade, could have secondary effects, such as shareholder losses, revenue losses to processors and shippers, and so forth.
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From page 226... ...
. The disease spread to a nearby poultry ranch via escaped infected exotic birds or by cats taking infected dead birds that were improperly disposed of back to the poultry ranch.
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From page 227... ...
html#vvnd Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza 227 Avian influenza affects a wide variety of farmed and wild birds predom~ nantly of chickens and turkeys, but also game birds such as pheasants, partridge, and quail; ratites (ostrich and emu) ; psittacines (parrots)
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From page 228... ...
, with follow-on effects of extensive layoffs in the slaughter and processing plants; grossly affect feed grain production and the farming community; and stop exports. If an attack were against only one region, there would still be significant price disturbances and an increase in consumer costs.
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From page 229... ...
In the Great Plains of the United States, stem rust and leaf rust epidemics often have caused yield losses in wheat far exceeding 20 million bushels. As recently as 1993, leaf rust destroyed more than 40 million bushels of wheat in Kansas and Nebraska.
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From page 230... ...
The setback is probably 100 percent predictable in hindsight, especially if the outbreak has revealed embedded defects in program design, implementation, reporting cycle and response time, funding, training, or tactical control. Many national disease control programs work well until they are challenged by a real epidemic.
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From page 231... ...
Therefore, unless the circumstances are blatantly those of an obvious biological event the biological equivalent of the Oklahoma City bombing, such as 10 widely separated cases of rinderpest across the United States within one weeks the primary investigative position is that the situation was normal and, if unexpected, merely unusual. Thus, Rule One: "Rule out normality." And Rule Two: "Try harder to rule out normality." Only if that fails does Rule Three apply: "Round up the usual suspects." THE 1973 NEWCASTLE DISEASE OUTBREAK IN NORTHERN IRELAND: A CASE STUDY The event itself was certainly unexpected, since Northern Ireland did not and does not import animal proteins or by-products, such as bone meals or poul
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From page 232... ...
(Of course, if viewed from the opposite direction, varied Newcastle disease virus strains would be characteristic of an aggressive group with tight security and three separate teams, each with their own infected eggs to be placed broken in the targeted flocks so that they would be eaten by the chickens; or however else delivery was to be achieved a Roswell interpretation, in the opinion of the writer.)
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