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The Germs Next Door
STAN COX
Counterpunch
Thursday, March 27, 2008
What would it take to convince you that your town should play
host to the world's most feared human and animal pathogens? Believe
it or not, five states are locked in fierce competition over a
proposed bioterror lab that would have them doing just that.
In 2002, the newly created Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
was given control of Plum Island Animal Disease Center in New
York. Now DHS is seeking a home in the heartland for a National
Bio and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF) that would take over Plum
Island's work, along with its potent microbial cultures. The fact
that many diseases are now known to jump between humans and animals,
combined with this decade's terror-fixation, has led the federal
government to convert the agricultural problem of sick livestock
into the national-security problem of bioterrorism.
Do I hear a bid?
Lying off the east end of New York's Long Island, Plum Island
(which was under the Department of Agriculture until 2002) is
the only place in the nation where scientists have previously
been allowed to handle the pathogens that cause foot-and-mouth
disease, rinderpest, Rift Valley fever, African swine fever, and
other horrific maladies that, if let loose on the mainland, could
cause billions in agricultural losses and even threaten human
populations.
(Article continues below)
NBAF will be a "biosafety level 4" (BL-4) facility,
providing the highest degree of isolation for the world's most
dangerous organisms (Plum Island was one notch down, at BL-3,
because it was isolated by water). Locations being eyed as possible
sites include the University of Georgia campus in Athens; the
campus of Kansas State University in Manhattan; Flora, Mississippi,
near the capital city of Jackson; a research farm 17 miles northeast
of Duke University in North Carolina; and a former ranch near
San Antonio, Texas.
There is cutthroat competition for the lab, with DHS being courted
with the kinds of incentives that go to all big potential employers.
The University of Georgia has offered 66 acres of prime real estate
worth $15 million and $4.5 million in road and utility improvements.
The Kansas Senate approved the issue of $164 million in bonds
to pay for land, roads, and security for NBAF. Now, DHS is reportedly
demanding that the lab, wherever it is sited, have its own energy
source, a natural gas-fired power plant. Governor Kathleen Sebelius
immediately agreed to throw that into the Kansas bid.
A big bio-gamble
Every potential location for the bioterror facility lies close
to large human and animal populations. In Manhattan, Kansas, for
example, the lab would be located not only in an agricultural
region, and not only in the nation's second most tornado-prone
state, but also within hailing distance of a senior-citizen home,
a student housing area, an affordable-housing complex, a student
recreation facility, a football stadium, and a basketball arena.
Kansas State University biology professor Walter Dodd will be
have the new bioterror lab a mile north of his workplace if his
state wins the sweepstakes. He says that in the struggle over
the lab, it's impossible to compare risks. "There has been
no formal risk assessment of the BSL-4 facility that is available
to the public. Likewise, knowing the risk from terrorists introducing
new pathogens is difficult." Although, he says, "We
need to do this type of research because we must control diseases
if possible," he worries about the proposed locations: "Putting
the facility near a city or agricultural production strips one
level of protection away." Dodd has recommended putting the
lab in a desert or back on Plum Island.
Last year, DHS held a series of public meetings at the five candidate
sites for the lab, soliciting comment on environmental, health,
safety, and socioeconomic issues. The Department compiled almost
4000 such comments, the majority of them apparently negative.
Residents raised a host of alarms about accidents, sabotage, natural
disasters, ecosystem damage, water contamination, human or animal
epidemics, use of the lab for secret, sinister research, and the
general ineptitude of DHS. The Department is working on its responses.
When the bioterror lab is awarded to one of the five contenders
this fall, residents of the "winning" location will
be asked to accept such vaguely defined risks in good patriotic
spirit, to protect the nation's cities, towns, pastures, and feedlots
from a hypothetical terrorist attack. But the facility will be
run by administrators drawn from the same pool as those who responded
to the only actual bioterror attack in this country to date --
the anthrax mailings of October, 2001 -- and who have made virtually
no progress in solving them.
Furthermore, as I argued on the CounterPunch site in 2004, any
agroterrorists who might want to see their mission accomplished
in rural America need only sit back and watch. Agrocapitalism
is already doing their work for them: poisoning water supplies,
releasing antibiotic-resistant, highly pathogenic bacteria into
streams and dust clouds, and contaminating our food supply.
Even bioterror alarmists admit that the increasing concentration
of US agriculture, and its increasingly industrial infrastructure,
are precisely what make it more vulnerable. The US Government's
General Accounting Office acknowledged in a 2005 report that
the highly concentrated breeding and rearing practices of our
livestock industry make it a vulnerable target for terrorists
because diseases could spread rapidly and be very difficult
to contain. For example, between 80 and 90 percent of grain-fed
beef cattle production is concentrated in less than 5 percent
of the nation's feedlots. Therefore, the deliberate introduction
of a highly contagious animal disease in a single feedlot could
have serious economic consequences.
The GAO didn't go on to discuss the damage that can be done by
such a highly concentrated farming system even if terrorists never
cast their shadow onto the churned soil of the American Plains.
And now the federal government plans to take a laboratory that
harbors some of the planet's most menacing animal and human germs
and place it closer than ever to the cattle feedlots and slaughterhouses
of Kansas or Texas, the hog-confinement facilities of North Carolina,
or the vast poultry operations of the Deep South.
Critics charge that bioterror-lab boosters at the universities
contending for NBAF have nothing but visions of fat grants dancing
in their heads. Vigorous opposition in Columbia, Missouri and
Madison, Wisconsin got those cities taken off the list of potential
sites. Last spring, when Columbia was still in contention for
the lab, Eddie Adelstein, an associate professor of pathology
at the University of Missouri and the county's Interim Medical
Examiner, wrote that his university was
developing a corporate structure to allow us to furnish our
own income, ignore the needs of the state and pay our top-level
executives CEO wages... To achieve ... financial independence,
members of the local welcoming committee for the proposed research
center are willing to risk the life of every man, women, child,
dog, cat, horse, cow and chicken in our homeland... Yielding
to their self-imposed pressure to become fiscally independent,
these leaders in business and education have and are attempting
to lure to Columbia a high-tech government facility that belongs
in a safer place. The desires of economic growth have overridden
all aspects of science and common sense. They would place this
facility near homes, schools and nursing facilities... When
accidents occur, we would provide interesting but frightful
data as these organisms have a predilection for children, older
adults or just young people.
Full
article here.
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