Better plan needed to protect U.S. agriculture from Bioterrorism. (Update).

The United States is vulnerable to agricultural bioterrorism and needs a comprehensive plan to defend against the threat, says a new report from the National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academies. The relevant government agencies cannot rapidly detect and identify many pests and pathogens and could not quickly respond to a large-scale attack, which would overwhelm existing laboratory and field resources.

"Biological agents that could be used to harm crops or livestock are widely available and pose a major threat to U.S. agriculture," said Harley W Moon, chair of the committee that wrote the report and professor of veterinary medicine at Iowa State University in Ames. "Part of the plan to defend against agricultural bioterrorism should be to enhance our basic understanding of the biology of pests and pathogens so that we can develop new tools for surveillance and new ways to control an outbreak."

The committee began its study at the request of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) before the September 11 terrorist attacks. Those acts and the subsequent anthrax attacks--which showed that "bioterrorism is now a reality," as the report puts it--heightened concerns about an attack on U.S. agriculture. The report says that while a bioterrorism attack on U.S. agriculture is highly unlikely to result in famine or malnutrition, it could harm people, disrupt the economy, and cause widespread public concern and confusion. The recent outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease that arose naturally in the United Kingdom, for example, led to the destruction of millions of animals and cost billions of dollars.

Given the importance of this report to homeland defense, the National Academies took the unusual step of briefing USDA and the Office of Homeland Security earlier this year on its preliminary findings and conclusions. The report also was submitted to USDA and the Office of Homeland Security for a classification review. Because the government has been aware of the main recommendations for several months, it is possible that authorities have already taken some steps to act on them.

Although USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service has several emergency plans for dealing with the unintentional introduction of plant and animal pests and pathogens, the committee could not find, as of last spring, any publicly available indepth national plan to defend against the intentional introduction of biological agents. The committee also said that significant gaps exist in U.S. knowledge about foreign pests and pathogens.

A comprehensive plan to counter agricultural bioterrorism should define the role each federal and state agency will play in preventing and responding to an attack and should define how the agencies will cooperate with one another, the report says. The agencies involved should develop a consensus list of biological agents that might be used in an attack. A shorter list of agents for which preparations can be made--a list representative of various types of agents and the plant or animal species--also should be drawn up. The development of countermeasures for this subset of agents would be valuable to officials and frontline personnel in the event of an attack, even if the agent ultimately confronted does not happen to be on the short list. In addition, credible spokespeople are needed and potential attack scenarios should be developed for training purposes.

The report recommends building upon USDAs current emergency plans for coping with unintentional introduction of pests and pathogens. Nevertheless, the new plan must be designed specifically for terrorist threats.

As part of the plan, the United States needs to create a network of laboratories to coordinate the detection of bioterror agents in the event of an attack. USDA appears to have budgeted for such a network in the next fiscal year, the committee said. A nationwide agricultural bioterrorism communication system, modeled after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC's) Health Alert Network, also is necessary. New technologies are needed to aid in the early detection of bioterror agents, especially genetically engineered ones.