Fallout Shelters and Food Scares.

When I was growing up, the threat of Communists dropping a bomb on the United States was a childhood fear.  The Soviet Union and the United States were sworn enemies.  People invested in bomb shelters in their home’s basement, stockpiled food in the event of an attack, and spent a lot of time worrying about something that never happened.  I recall vividly the anxiety that I felt as our elementary school teachers carried out exercises that supposedly would save students from the effects of a bombing.  We would all huddle under our desks and wait for the signal that it was safe to come out.

As I reflect on those totally ridiculous attempts to supposedly safeguard our lives from nuclear attacks from an enemy across the ocean, it reminds me of some of the hysteria I am witnessing today regarding agri-terrorism and its potential to be inflicted on America.  Policy makers are running around in circles trying to figure out how best to protect consumers from a deliberate act to destroy our nation’s food supply by a foreign disease being sown into our agronomic crops or livestock.  We are investing millions of dollars in “fallout shelters” for our food supply.  Hopefully, the future will prove that the United States’ citizens had no need of theses 21st century government safeguards any more than we needed those unused investments of the 1960s.

I attended a meeting this week that focused on foot-and-mouth disease.  How can we protect and defend our food industry from some culprit who may want to introduce this highly contagious disease to our farms.  While this disease is seldom contracted by humans and has a low morbidity rate in livestock, it is highly contagious among cloven-hoofed animals.  First identified as being caused by a virus more than 100 years ago, there has not been an incidence of HMD in the United States since 1929.  With quarantine, slaughter and disposal of infected animals, along with farmstead disinfection, this disease has been eliminated from North and Central America, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Ireland.  The disease occurs infrequently in Europe and Great Britain, but persists in Asia, Africa and South America.

My point here is not to suggest we ignore the potential threat an FMD outbreak could have on our livestock industry, but to point out that systems put in place years ago have worked to protect our food industry.  The new “cures” being proposed to respond to “suspected” cases could do more damage to the economy and the welfare of people and livestock than the disease.

For those who may have forgotten  their FMD facts, it is a disease that affects cattle, hogs, sheep, goats, deer, elk, and other cervids.  It causes fever, loss of appetite, weight loss, blisters around the mouth, feet and udder.  These blisters are heavily infected with the virus.  The disease is spread through contact with secretions from blisters, saliva, milk, urine, and can be spread by contaminated food, water, soil or through the air.  It can be carried by rats, dogs, birds, wild animals, semen, embryos or in contaminated meats.

While the opportunity for this disease to be transported seems almost too easy, the fact that we have not had any confirmed cases of FMD since the early 1900s should give us confidence in our current regulatory agencies.

I am not recommending that the safeguards we have in place today be diminished.  I am saying that we spend too much time and energy on the “what ifs,” getting computers to generate scenarios that might never happen.  Our highway infrastructure that allows food to be hauled all over our country in a few days does impose a risk of rapidly transporting diseases.  People traveling to other countries can also carry contagious diseases home.  Nothing is new about that information except a heightened phobia.

We all need to be vigilant.  But, we don’t need to be paranoid.  Scaring people into panic about food safety is not good business for anyone in agriculture and does nothing to address the real or imagined threat of agri-terrorism.
 
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