FW: New announcement: America's Soft Underbelly -excerpt from Bird Flu - A virus of our own hatching

[Guest guest]

Dear friends at aapn,

 

The following from the Live Export Shame Forum is most informative.

 

Regards.

 

Chinny Krishna

 

 

America’s Soft Underbelly

 

http://birdflubook.com/a.php?id=47 & t=p

 

According to the Government Accountability Office, the watchdog arm of

Congress , long-distance live animal transport not only places countries at

risk for catastrophic disease outbreaks, but it makes them vulnerable to

bioterrorism as well. U.S. animal agriculture has been described as a

particularly easy target, as “one of the probable threats for an economic

attack on this country,” according to the U.S. Deputy Secretary of

Agriculture, and also as a direct attack on our citizenry.

 

In 2004, the RAND Corporation prepared a report on agroterrorism for the

Office of the Secretary of Defense titled, Hitting America’s Soft

Underbelly. It blamed America’s vulnerability in part on the “concentrated

and intensive nature of contemporary U.S. farming practices.” According to

the last USDA census in 1997, just 2% of the nation’s feedlots produced

three-quarters of the cattle and 1% of U.S. egg farms confine more than

three-fourths of the nation’s egg-laying hens.Given that “highly crowded”

animals are reared in “extreme proximity” in the United States, one infected

animal could quickly expose thousands of others.

 

The RAND Corporation points out that individual animals raised by U.S.

agriculture have become progressively more prone to disease as a result of

increasingly routine invasive procedures:

 

Herds that have been subjected to such modifications—which have included

everything from sterilization programs to dehorning, branding, and hormone

injections—have typically suffered higher stress levels that have lowered

the animals’ natural tolerance to disease from contagious organisms and

increased the viral and bacterial “volumes” that they normally shed in the

event of an infection.

Long-distance live transport could then ferry the spreading infection,

according to USDA models, to as many as 25 states within five days.

Curtailing the long-distance live transport of animals, as well as the

concentration and intensification of the food animal industry, could thus

potentially be a matter of national security.

 

 

You can view the full announcement by following this link:

 

http://www.liveexportshame.com/news2/index.php?topic=2877.0

 

Regards,

The Live Export Shame Forum Team.