Global trade has wrought profound effects that DHS, USDA, and industry are still struggling to accommodate. Every year, it seems, something nobody had anticipated is introduced – the 2009 international convention, for example, that required fumigation of solid wood packaging and pallets, after newly cut wood used in packaging was discovered to contain burrowing beetle larvae.

The increasing mobility of plants and animals can pose a direct threat to human health in the form of foodborne or zoonotic diseases – diseases that can be passed between animals and humans, such as rabies, plague, Ebola virus, and avian flu (H1N1). Hawkins is part of a USDA emergency response team that travels around the country and coordinates incident response with state, federal and local entities. When USDA surveillance discovered a California dairy cow that had been stricken with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE or “mad cow disease”) in April 2012, the team coordinated with several federal agencies and the state’s Emergency Management Agency (Cal EMA) and Department of Food and Agriculture to isolate the animal, trace the etiology of the disease, and minimize the risk to other animals.

Hawkins’ team also participated in the response to the largest U.S. animal disease outbreak in the last 30 years – the Exotic Newcastle Disease (END) outbreak that began in Southern California and spread to other Western states in 2002 and 2003. END, an avian viral disease, is transmissible to humans, and there is no treatment; afflicted birds must be culled to prevent the spread of the disease. The USDA team joined the interagency task force that eradicated END in the West within 10 months – but not before 4 million birds had been depopulated, at a cost of $160 million.

 

Countermeasures

After the END outbreak, APHIS set up an outreach program, Biosecurity for Birds, aimed at educating agricultural and backyard American bird owners about how to keep birds healthy and recognize signs of disease.

Such an overwhelming response to an animal disease outbreak – the use of Incident Command System protocols that unite the resources of multiple regional, state, and federal agencies to affect swift quarantine and eradication efforts, followed by a vigorous and far-reaching campaign to prevent or minimize future outbreaks – is a sign of how seriously government and industry take such a threat as a national security issue. “An outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease would be horrendous in this country,” Hawkins said. “People don’t have any idea what the potential impacts are – they would be immediate and dramatic. It would turn our commodities markets upside down. The stock market would freak out. And that’s just related to agriculture – in other words, it’s not a human disease.”

While prevention is a terrific goal, the increasing speed of global commerce makes it seem more like wishful thinking – but prevention strategies are included in the portfolio of measures the federal government, through partnerships at research institutions and land-grant universities, is in a constant race to discover. At Kansas State University, for example, the Biosecurity Research Institute (BRI), established in 2006, provides a secure location for the study of diseases rated up to biosafety level (BSL) 3 – diseases that are potentially fatal, but for which treatments exist. Across campus, the National Agricultural Biosecurity Center (NABC), applies the emergency management model to anticipating threats and securing the food supply.

“We work in some of the more niche segments of agricultural biosecurity,” said Dr. Marty Vanier, the NABC’s director of operations. “We do a fair amount of work with planning and training for agricultural disease response – of which animal disease response would probably be the largest segment, but we have done some work with respect to field crops, and we’re doing some work with respect to foodborne disease. We’ve also done a lot of work with the law enforcement community and the military community. We’ve created some agricultural training programs for different state National Guards, because they’ve been tasked to do some agricultural redevelopment work in other parts of the world.”

The BRI and NABC were established after the arrival on campus of Dr. Jerry Jaax, a retired Army colonel who worked in biodefense at the United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Md. – where he learned that the biggest potential biowarfare threats were primarily classic veterinary diseases such as anthrax, plague, and botulinum. “Back in 1998, the year I got here,” Jaax said, “the president of the university and several other of the senior leaders had decided that K-State should take the lead in looking at some agricultural biodefense initiatives.”

Today, Jaax holds the job titles of associate vice provost for Research Compliance and University Veterinarian at the university. As soon as the BRI had opened its doors, he said, USDA and DHS declared their intent to replace the only laboratory considered secure enough to accommodate research of FMD: the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, a BSL-3 facility established in 1954 and located off the northeastern tip of New York’s Long Island. After several years of study, a final choice was made: the new facility – the National Bio- and Agro-defense Facility, or NBAF – would be built on the campus of Kansas State University, on land adjacent to the BRI.

The NBAF, designed and conceived as BSL-4 facility – a facility in which potentially lethal pathogens, for which no known vaccines or treatments are available, are studied – has been controversial from the start. Unlike Plum Island, which is only reachable by DHS-controlled ferry, the NBAF is proposed to stand just a few miles off Interstate 70, in the heart of U.S. cattle country, a tornado-prone region. After receiving unfavorable risk assessments by both the General Accounting Office and the National Research Council, Congress has declined to fund the NBAF – whose price tag has climbed to about $1 billion – in DHS’s 2013 budget.

DHS insists that plans to construct the NBAF in Kansas should move forward, and Jaax considers a replacement for Plum Island to be a necessity. “Plum Island is nearly 70 years old,” he said. “Its infrastructure is crumbling, and it’s woefully inadequate to address these national security issues.”

A facility that can carry on the work of researching high-consequence diseases such as FMD virus, Jaax said, could open the door for the discovery of the ultimate countermeasure.

“I think we are in a much stronger position than we were a decade and a half ago,” he said, “when nobody would really pay attention [to an animal disease] until you had a maximum credible event. I think now at least the federal government and the states, and even down to the local level, they have very much thought about what to do … That’s the good news. But it still would be a very, very significant event to have an outbreak here. If we had a vaccine, we could just cross that one off the list as a threat.”

This article first appeared in the U.S. Agriculture Outlook: 2013 Edition.