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In comparison to a bioterrorism target like a water treatment plant,meat processing plants have virtually no security, and their workforcesare wide open to infiltration. Many of the nation's slaughterhouses arestaffed with poorly trained and poorly paid migrant workers, often withlittle documentation or background checks. The typical plant turns overits entire staff each year, virtually guaranteeing that no one reallyknows 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 thenational average. In 1999, more than one out of four of America's150,000 meatpacking workers suffered a job-related injury or illness.The safety of the food chain is probably not the primary concern forworkers 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-forman unlikely first line of defense against food-borne illnesses. A terrorist could contaminate a huge amount of store-ready meat with astrategically placed sample of a species like E. coli or salmonella orlisteria. And unlike anthrax, which is hard to obtain and prepare, thesebioweapons are readily available. Studies in the October 18 issue of the New England Journal of Medicinedemonstrate that government regulations already fail to guarantee thesafety of our food. One study shows that one in five samples of groundmeat obtained in U.S. supermarkets carried antibiotic-resistantsalmonella. Another study found that more than half of the chickensbought from 26 supermarkets in Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota and Oregoncarried resistant forms of the sometimes fatal germ Enterococcusfaecium. In the case of our food chain, a public health disaster is just waitingto happen, without any terrorist threats whatsoever. Les Friedlander, aformer USDA veterinarian, suggests that someone working in a plant couldeasily obtain a sample of salmonella or E. coli or some otherlife-threatening agent from the plant's meat inspection lab, and usethis sample for large-scale contamination. A gradual gutting of the nation's meat inspection workforce andauthority in recent decades means that current regulations and measuresdon'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 isnot unique. From a biowarfare perspective, the easiest targets aregenetically similar populations of organisms for whom a single bug couldeasily infect the majority of individuals. Consider that 90 percent ofthe nations dairy cows are closely related Holsteins. The nation'slargest pork producer, Smithfield, controls 12 million hogs who arevirtual clones of each other. The factory farms that confine tens ofthousands of animals in close and unhygienic quarters or the monoscapesof wheat or soybeans that cover much of the Heartland resemble theproverbial sitting duck. We don't need the Hollywood scriptwriters that the Central IntelligenceAgency retained recently to "think outside the box" on potentialterrorist threats to the food we eat. Instead, while public awareness onmatters of safety is so high, we have a perfect opportunity to clean upthe food system from within, creating more hygienic living conditionsfor livestock, placing restrictions on antibiotic use in feed, andproviding more humane working conditions for slaughterhouse workers. In the same way that Upton Sinclair in The Jungle cast a spotlight onthe stomach-turning practices of turn of 19th century meat processingindustry, the threat of terrorism is casting a spotlight on industryafter industry, from mail delivery to air travel, exposingvulnerabilities that were often known but never taken seriously. In the past the public health argument for cleaning up America's foodchains has repeatedly failed to inspire politicians to support thechanges we need to protect all Americans from contaminated food. If weare lucky, today's rallying cries for homeland security will finallylead to meaningful actions to secure our food supplies from the threatsof both accidental and terrorist epidemics. Brian Halweil is a Research Associate at the Worldwatch Institute, anon-profit environmental and public policy research institute, inWashington DC. He focuses on the social and ecological consequences ofthe way we produce food. He writes on biotechnology, loss of farmers,population and malnutrition. ###
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