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 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 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.
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.
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.
An edited version of this commentary appeared in the Los Angeles Times on
November 2, 2001
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