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NEWS FROM THE WORLDWATCH INSTITUTE
The following article by Brian Halweil appeared in a
slightly edited
form in the Los Angeles Times November 2, 2001. If you wish
to reply to
the author, please email: halweil@worldwatch.org.
This article is one of a series that Worldwatch researchers
are
producing in response to the events of September 11 and afterwards.
Previous articles include:
"Energy After September 11: A Commentary"
(http://www.worldwatch.org/alerts/011016.html)
by Seth Dunn
"A New Marshall Plan: Advancing Human Security and
Controlling
Terrorism"
(http://www.worldwatch.org/alerts/011009.html)
by Dick Bell and Michael
Renner
*************************************
November 6, 2001
THE BIOTERROR IN YOUR BURGER
By Brian Halweil, Research
Associate, Worldwatch Institute
When the foot-and-mouth virus spread through the British
countryside
this past spring-costing the nation an estimated $6
billion-conspiracy
theorists speculated that the introduction was an
intentional act of
biowarfare. While this particular disease doesn't harm
humans, it can
weaken livestock herds, decimate farm incomes, devastate
consumer
confidence in the food supply, and bring rural economies to a
standstill
with quarantines and other restrictions.
Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman
(http://www.usda.gov/news/special/ctc25.htm)
recently cited her
department's success at containing food-and-mouth as
proof that the U.S.
government is prepared to respond to any terrorist
attacks on the food
we eat. But like so many official statements during the
current round of
anthrax attacks, her optimism may be sadly misplaced
Consider one particularly vulnerable link in our food chain:
the modern
meat processing plant. Operating around the country, the typical
plant
can process millions of pounds of ground beef or hotdogs or cold cuts
in
just a few days.
In comparison to a bioterrorism target like a water
treatment plant,
meat processing plants have virtually no security, and
their workforces
are wide open to infiltration. Many of the nation's
slaughterhouses are
staffed with poorly trained and poorly paid migrant
workers, often with
little documentation or background checks. The typical
plant turns over
its entire staff each year, virtually guaranteeing that no
one really
knows who is working there.
Meatpacking is already the nation's most life-threatening
occupation.
The rate of serious injury-losing a limb or an eye-is five
times the
national average. In 1999, more than one out of four of America's
150,000 meatpacking workers suffered a job-related injury or illness.
The safety of the food chain is probably not the primary concern for
workers who are struggling to avoid being mauled by mechanical knives,
or ducking two-ton carcasses moving by at breakneck speed.
Yet, in many ways, these people-and the conditions at these
plants-form
an unlikely first line of defense against food-borne illnesses.
A terrorist could contaminate a huge amount of store-ready
meat with a
strategically placed sample of a species like E. coli or
salmonella or
listeria. And unlike anthrax, which is hard to obtain and
prepare, these
bioweapons are readily available.
Studies in the October 18 issue of the New England Journal
of Medicine
(http://content.nejm.org/content/vol345/issue16/index.shtml)
demonstrate
that government regulations already fail to guarantee the
safety of our
food. One study shows that one in five samples of ground meat
obtained
in U.S. supermarkets carried antibiotic-resistant salmonella.
Another
study found that more than half of the chickens bought from 26
supermarkets in Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota and Oregon carried
resistant forms of the sometimes fatal germ Enterococcus faecium.
In the case of our food chain, a public health disaster is
just waiting
to happen, without any terrorist threats whatsoever. Les
Friedlander, a
former USDA veterinarian, suggests that someone working in a
plant could
easily obtain a sample of salmonella or E. coli or some other
life-threatening agent from the plant's meat inspection lab, and use
this sample for large-scale contamination.
A gradual gutting of the nation's meat inspection workforce
and
authority in recent decades means that current regulations and measures
don't even catch the unintentional introductions of these contaminants.
Just in the first 9 months of 2001, the USDA announced 60 recalls,
totaling nearly 30 million pounds of meat.
Unfortunately, the vulnerability of this meat link in the
food chain is
not unique. From a biowarfare perspective, the easiest
targets are
genetically similar populations of organisms for whom a single
bug could
easily infect the majority of individuals. Consider that 90
percent of
the nations dairy cows are closely related Holsteins. The
nation's
largest pork producer, Smithfield, controls 12 million hogs that
are
virtual clones of each other. The factory farms that confine tens of
thousands of animals in close and unhygienic quarters or the monoscapes
of wheat or soybeans that cover much of the Heartland resemble the
proverbial sitting duck.
We don't need the Hollywood scriptwriters that the Central
Intelligence
Agency retained recently to "think outside the box" on
potential
terrorist threats to the food we eat. Instead, while public
awareness on
matters of safety is so high, we have a perfect opportunity to
clean up
the food system from within, creating more hygienic living
conditions
for livestock, placing restrictions on antibiotic use in feed,
and
providing more humane working conditions for slaughterhouse workers.
In the same way that Upton Sinclair in The Jungle cast a
spotlight on
the stomach-turning practices of turn of 19th century meat
processing
industry, the threat of terrorism is casting a spotlight on
industry
after industry, from mail delivery to air travel, exposing
vulnerabilities that were often known but never taken seriously. (The
Jungle may be downloaded for free from Project Gutenberg,
http://promo.net/pg/index.html).
In the past the public health argument for cleaning up
America's food
chains has repeatedly failed to inspire politicians to
support the
changes we need to protect all Americans from contaminated
food. If we
are lucky, today's rallying cries for homeland security will
finally
lead to meaningful actions to secure our food supplies from the
threats
of both accidental and terrorist epidemics.
-- End --
Brian Halweil is a Research Associate at the Worldwatch
Institute, a
non-profit environmental and public policy research institute,
in
Washington DC. He focuses on the social and ecological consequences of
the way we produce food. He writes on biotechnolgy, loss of farmers,
population and malnutrition.
RELATED WORKS BY BRIAN HALWEIL:
How Now Mad Cow?
http://www.worldwatch.org/alerts/010308.html
Organic Gold Rush, World Watch Magazine, May/June 2001.
https://secure.worldwatch.org/cgi-bin/wwinst/143b
Where have all the Farmers Gone? World Watch Magazine,
September/October
2000.
https://secure.worldwatch.org/cgi-bin/wwinst/135b
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