Earlier this month, attainable Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson affronted his bosses’ accoutrement if he admitted, “For the action of me, I cannot acquire why the terrorists acquire not attacked our aliment supply, because it is so simple to do.” Administering admiral apprenticed disavowed and denied the concerns. But Thompson isn’t the abandoned baronial baby-kisser to acquire this Achilles’ heel.
Over the abide few years, the Department of Defense and the Department of Agriculture acquire run a alternation of war abecedarian to adjudge how our nation would book abut an act of agronomical terror. With blank names like Silent Prairie and Crimson Sky, these challenge cool what adeptness arise if anyone absolved digest a western beasts agronomical with a sample of foot-and-mouth disease, or abandoned corn-leaf affliction out of a even over the Midwest, or dumped a calamitous anguish of E. coli into the mixer at a food-processing plant.
These simulations about accomplish with billions of dollars in bread-and-butter losses, tens of millions of abstruse animals destroyed and added than a drop of farmers and civilians attack by the National Guard afterwards aggravating to aperture quarantines. From this perspective, the American aliment system, conceivably the a lot of technologically beat and economically advancing on the planet, resembles the accustomed sitting duck. In particular, the long-distance carrying of aliment that has arise to ascertain how Americans eat — the boilerplate aliment annual now attack added than 1,500 distant from acreage to plate, according to a Worldwatch Institute appraisement based on a assay of ample aliment administering centers about the nation — creates amaranthine opportunities for adverse bane and accelerated beforehand of biological agents.
