U.S. Food Supply Seen Vulnerable To Terrorist Acts

"U.S. Food Supply Seen Vulnerable To Terrorist Acts"

The Associated Press

After attacks from the air and the mail, officials worry the nation's food supply could be next. The government considers potential targets to be fruits and vegetables that people eat raw and cattle that could be infected with fast spreading foot-and-mouth disease.

To deter potential terrorists, Congress is considering proposals to hire hundreds of new food inspectors and lab technicians and empower the government to seize or recall tainted products and inspect food makers' records.

The Agriculture Department has put veternarians on alert and wants more guards to protect its labs around the country that work with food pathogens. "Food security can no longer be separated from out national security," Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., said Thursday.

Terrorists could poison a limited amount of food and still "create a general atmosphere of fear and anxiety without actually having carry out indiscriminate civilian- oriented attacks," Peter Chalk of the Rand Corp. think tank recently told Congress.

Fresh produce may be food most vulnerable to attack because it's often eaten raw and is subject to little inspection. The only known terrorist attack on U.S. food occured in the 1980s, when a cult in Oregon contaminated salad bars with salmonella bacteria.

There are dozens of labs that work with pathogens, but terrorists wouldn't necessarily need to get their bacteria there. Salmonella can be found on supermarket chicken and grown in a lab. A strain of E. coli is commonly found in cattle manure.

But it would take a lot of bacteria to contaminate food and some bugs are dangerous primarily to people who are sick or old, said Susan Sumner, an authority on food safety at Virginia Tech.

"You could pour it on stuff in the supermarket. But if your goal is to disrupt the economy and make a lot of people sick, you're not going to do it that way," she said.

Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, meeting with Republican lawmakers Thursday, assured them the food supply is safe.

"We have veen looking at where the critical points are and taking all the precautions that we can in dealing with the private sector," she said.

Her biggest concern, she said, is that terrorists would contaminate a big feedlot with the virus that causes foot-and-mouth desease. It's harmless to humans but it could be devastating economically. This year's outbreak in Britain forced the slaughter of nearly 4 million animals.

The virus is not found in the United States outside of a high-security Agriculture Department lab in New York, so a terrorist would have to bring it into the country, possibly in contaminated meat.

The Bush administration has asked Congress for $106 million in emergency spending for food and agriculture security. FDA wants to hire 410 new inspectors, lab specialists and other personnel to check fruits, vegetables, and other products, primarily imports, and buy additional equipment to detect pathogens. FDA currantly inspects just 1 percent of imports. The chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W. Va., is proposing a $3.1 billion biosecurity plan that will exceed the administration's request for food safety, aides said.

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