Food Safety:  Agriculture Terrorism Simulation Set For Today

U.S. officials and lawmakers are set to take part today in a simulation of a terrorist attack on the nation’s food supply, USA Today reported (see GSN, Sept. 9, 2002).

The simulation, named Silent Prairie, is scheduled to take place at the National Defense University in Washington.  Surgeon General Richard Carmona, Agriculture Department officials, FBI representatives, Federal Emergency Management Agency officials and 18 members of Congress are scheduled to attend the simulation.

The exercise will simulate the outbreak and spread of foot-and-mouth disease and the national response and consequences, USA Today reported.

“Foot-and-mouth disease is by far our biggest threat and worry,” said Maj. Gen. Gregory Gardner, Kansas adjutant general and director of emergency management, at a National Governors Association meeting last week.

An outbreak “would not be a local event,” said Thomas McGinn, assistant state veterinarian with the North Carolina Department of Agriculture.  The constant transportation of animals across state borders makes any disease a national issue, he said.

“Any kind of foreign animal disease, if it took only five days to detect, would be all over the country,” McGinn added.

RAND analysts have determined that no U.S. city has a food supply on hand to last more than seven days and “thousands of food processing plants have minimal biosecurity,” said Paul Williams, a veterinarian with Georgia’s Emergency Management Agency.

State budget shortfalls make this problem particularly tough to counter, McGinn said.

“Dollars needed for this area of homeland defense have yet to come forward,” he said (see GSN, Feb. 4; Anita Manning, USA Today, Feb. 11).

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Radiological Weapons:  Al-Qaeda “Dirty Bomb” Factored in U.S. Threat Alert

The decision to elevate the U.S. terrorism alert level Friday to “orange,” indicating a high risk of attack, was based in part on concerns that al-Qaeda has intensified its efforts to acquire “dirty bombs,” U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft said Friday (see GSN, Feb. 7).

“We have seen, both from the practice of al-Qaeda and from the law enforcement work of individuals around the world and from the intelligence community, that al-Qaeda continues to demonstrate a very serious interest in chemical, biological as well as radiological devices, the impacts of which would obviously be adverse,” Ashcroft said.  “It’s based on those considerations, as well as others, that we find this occasion one in which we feel that we should elevate this designation from ‘elevated state’ to a ‘high state’ of alert,” he added.

There is still no conclusive evidence that al-Qaeda has actually constructed a radiological weapon, U.S. officials said (see GSN, Jan. 31).  However, they said they believe the terrorist group has done so and plans to use a dirty bomb in an upcoming attack.  This is the first time the threat alert level has been raised due to such concerns, according to the Los Angeles Times.

“There has always been a concern about al-Qaeda obtaining biological, chemical and radiological weapons,” a U.S. counterterrorism official said.  “I think that concern is growing, and that is why it was mentioned today.  It was not mentioned before in connection with raising the threat level,” the official added (Josh Meyer, Los Angeles Times, Feb. 8).

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