Animal docs fill homeland security slots

WASHINGTON - Are chickens a terrorist threat?  How about cows, pigs or sheep? Such questions could easily veer into tongue-in-cheek answers suitable for late-night TV monologues, but in the world of homeland security they are deadly serious.

There are 31 recorded cases of agro-terrorism in the Weapons of Mass Destruction Database, 10 of them directed at livestock, according to the Journal of Animal Science. Concern about a terrorist strike against the nation’s food supply spiked when al-Qaida documents found in a cave in Afghanistan suggested that terrorists considered ways to introduce contaminants into the food supply.

"I, for the life of me, cannot understand why the terrorists have not, you know, attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do," Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson said in a December speech as he was stepping down from the post.

Concern about intentional animal-born disease outbreaks as acts of terrorism have been around for years. But the placing of agriculture on an equal footing with the power grid, financial, transportation and telecommunications sectors as “critical infrastructure” is a relatively new development. 

An agro-terrorism scenario
The Iowa Department of Homeland Security at Agroville, a multi-discipline training program that discusses how different levels of government and different communities respond to foreign animal disease outbreaks, has come up with an agro-terrorism exercise scenario that plays out like this:

An animal disease outbreak starts on a single Iowa farm when the owner notices strange blisters on his hogs.  Eight months later, nearly 10,000 animals have been slaughtered; every major foreign trading partner has banned U.S. animal imports. The cost to Iowa alone could top $12 billion.

State agriculture departments across the nation are developing similar pseudo threat scenarios.

“Veterinarians play a key role in such scenarios,” says Colleen O’Keefe, former Illinois state veterinarian and now division manager of Food Safety and Animal Protection for the Illinois Department of Agriculture. The Illinois effort is “very grass roots” now, O’Keefe said and focuses on making vets more aware of diseases they may have pushed off their radar screen.

“When I was in school, they taught us that if you hear hoof beats ‘think horse, not zebra,’” O’Keefe said.  “And what we’re saying now is ‘think zebra, too.’”  There are a lot of diseases, such as foot-and-mouth, that have been eliminated from the United States and veterinarians may have simply stopped looking for them, she said.

Thinking exotic
O’Keefe said her office is telling vets they have to put exotic ailments back into their diagnosis routines and not simply exclude them because they are long shots.  “We’re telling them that even if a there’s a less than 1 percent chance ... keep it there, don’t rule out that possibility.”

And it’s not just the large-animal vet that is being brought under the homeland security umbrella; the doc that treats the family pet is being recruited as well. 

Reaching small-animal vets is priority for O’Keefe because she says these practitioners may very well be the first to see a harmful disease.  “The reason is that there are so many animals that come in as exotic pets,” O’Keefe said. A diseased animal that’s been living in a burrow in Africa on Monday could be in the family living room by Sunday, she said, leaving open the possibility that the sickness could jump to the human population.

As a result, veterinarians have been recruited in the war on terror.

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