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Sunday, March 09, 2003

By Lance Gay, Scripps Howard News Service

A six-month battle to control a virulent outbreak of a poultry disease in California is just a sampling of the problems the United States would face if terrorists tried to contaminate agriculture or the food supply, experts say.

But the U.S. Department of Agriculture and experts disagree on lessons learned.

Bobby Acord, director of the department's animal and plant inspection service, said that the campaign to eradicate the imported exotic Newcastle disease in California "is a classic example of the good things we do." It demonstrates that state and local officials can effectively deal with outbreaks of foreign pathogens brought into the United States either accidentally or deliberately, he said.

Others take exception. They say the difficulties in dealing with the outbreak -- which started in an urbanized area of ethnic immigrants, spread to commercial operations and has since been detected in neighboring Nevada and Arizona -- show how easy it would be for terrorists to sabotage America's agricultural base or its food supply.

"We are not prepared," poultry expert Simon Shane said. "If you are talking a bioterrorist attack using animal diseases, we haven't got a hope."

Shane, a retired veterinary professor from Louisiana State University, said the major difficulties agents have faced involved locating diseased fighting cocks and failing to use vaccines as an effective tool against outbreaks.

The outbreak of exotic Newcastle disease was uncovered in Los Angeles in September in a backyard chicken coop. The disease is especially lethal for poultry, causing more than 90 percent mortality in unvaccinated birds. It has been linked to pinkeye in some people.

California agriculture officials estimate there are at least 50,000 backyard chicken coops in the state, growing 3 million birds. The activities range from those raising poultry for food, breeders growing expensive show birds for stores and those raising fighting cocks. It's illegal to own fighting cocks in California, and under a federal law that goes into effect in May, it will be illegal to take them across state lines for fighting purposes.

Shane said federal and state agents' ineffectiveness in locating infected fighting cocks allowed the disease to fester in Los Angeles backyards until December, when the disease showed up in commercial hen houses in the region, and then crossed into an American Indian reservation in Arizona. It also jumped to Las Vegas, which, Shane said, indicates a clear cockfighting connection.

More than 3.4 million chickens have been exterminated in the effort to stamp out the disease. Agents from the federal and California agriculture departments have imposed a quarantine to keep it from spreading northward into areas of California where huge broiler and turkey farms are located. The last outbreak in California, in 1971, took three years to bring under control, and resulted in the slaughtering of 12 million birds. The state's industry is worth about $3.2 billion.

Harley Moon, an Iowa State University veterinary professor, headed a National Academy of Sciences panel that issued a report last year on America's vulnerability to agricultural or food diseases. He said the difficulties in fighting the poultry disease clearly demonstrate that holes in defenses need to be plugged.

"People aren't thinking health issues, and the threat to production," Moon said. "How different would this be if this were terrorism, or if someone deliberately brought in fighting cocks that were infected with some disease?'

Moon said introducing diseases into the country would be a simple but devastating way of crippling the economy.

"You don't have to attack directly, you can put it in the wildlife," he said.

Acord, the Department of Agriculture official, said the way state and federal agencies responded shows the effectiveness of the government response. He said the government was aware of the difficulty of reaching into the cockfighting community, and used specialty publications to educate owners about the dangers of the disease.

"Yes, it was more difficult and more challenging," Acord said, noting his agents were battling an outbreak in a largely urbanized area. "But if they are portraying this as a failure, it defies our experience."

Other criticism of the effort came from the Humane Society of the United States. Wayne Pacelli, the organization's vice president, charged that agriculture agents were recompensing owners for birds that were exterminated. Pacelli said better police efforts against cockfighting would have helped stop the spread, and said it's improper for the government to give value to such birds.

Acord said the government uses poultry appraisers to determine the value of birds.

"The way I look at it, we're buying the disease, not the birds," he said. "We can't eradicate the disease without buying the birds."

California officials would not give a price range for the birds.

Terry Conger, state epidemiologist with the Texas Animal Health Commission, said his state has alerted poultry growers to signs of the disease, and has set up rapid diagnosis laboratories to identify the disease if it comes to Texas.

"It kind of got away from us in California -- we could have moved more rapidly," he said.