NEWS FROM THE WORLDWATCH INSTITUTE
THE BIOTERROR IN YOUR BURGER
By Brian Halweil, Research Associate, Worldwatch Institute

(This piece is available for reproduction, citing author and institute.
Brian Halweil is available for comment on this topic. Contact details
are listed below)

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 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 coldcuts 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
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 who 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.

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 biotechnology, loss of farmers,
population and malnutrition. An edited version of this commentary
appeared in the Los Angeles Times on November 2, 2001

FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT:
Leanne Mitchell, Public Relations Specialist; Tel: 202-452-1992 ext. 527
Email: [email protected]
Brian Halweil, Research Associate; Tel: 202-452-1992 ext. 538 Email:
[email protected]

RELATED WORKS BY BRIAN HALWEIL:
How Now Mad Cow?
Organic Gold Rush, World Watch Magazine, May/June 2001.

Where have all the Farmers Gone? World Watch Magazine, September/October
2000.

VISIT THE WORLDWATCH WEBSITE AT: www.worldwatch.org

Leanne Mitchell
Public Relations Specialist
----------------------------------------------
Worldwatch Institute
1776 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington DC 20036
Tel: (202) 452-1992 ext.527
Fax: (202) 296-7365
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.worldwatch.org

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