In Brief... World News Review: Foot-and-Mouth Seen as Serious Threat to U.S. Agriculture

You are here

In Brief... World News Review

Foot-and-Mouth Seen as Serious Threat to U.S. Agriculture

Login or Create an Account

With a UCG.org account you will be able to save items to read and study later!

Sign In | Sign Up

×

The United States, which has not had a case of foot-and-mouth disease since 1929, has instituted extensive precautionary measures against infection from overseas, but is preparing as if an outbreak in the United States were a certainty.

Besides Britain, cases of the disease have been confirmed in the Netherlands, France, Ireland, Saudi Arabia, Argentina, South Korea and Taiwan. International air travelers arrive back in the United States to find that they're required to have their feet sprayed with a disinfectant by airport inspectors.

U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) official Bruce Braughman said, "We are certainly treating it like it's a probable likelihood." FEMA was one of several U.S. federal agencies that met on April 18 to outline plans on how to deal with an outbreak of foot-and-mouth. Other agencies included the Agriculture Department, the U.S. Army, the Coast Guard, the Interior Department, the Food and Drug Administration-even the CIA.

Meanwhile, intelligence operators at the Department of Agriculture are working on a vaccine for foot-and-mouth. Looking beyond natural causes, the intelligence community is concerned that the disease may have been started as an act of bio- or "agro-terrorism." Foot-and-mouth disease is easily released with no threat to the terrorist, and it spreads by itself.

Agro-terrorism isn't new, according to Peter Chalk, a Rand policy analyst who has studied the subject. "Germany...had an operation...in 1917 here in the United States [by which they] infected draft animals that were going to be sent to Europe. The Soviet Union had about 10,000 scientists and technicians working on anti-agriculture agents" (UPI, "Livestock Plagues Could Be Bio-Terror Attack," April 5, 2001).

The fact that U.S. livestock is largely concentrated in a few regions makes U.S. agriculture an attractive target for the agro-terrorist. As Britain knows all too well, the economic consequences could be disastrous.

Sources: USA Today, UPI, Reuters.