Manhattan Kansas - Center of Hoof and Mouth Research?

Should This Dangerous Disease Stay Where it Is?

Manhattan Kansas will soon by the home to the study of foreign animal and zoonotic (transferable from animal to human) diseases that can impact livestock, according to the ruling handed down by the Department of Homeland Security on January 16. For the last 54 years, this research has been conducted at a facility at Plum Island New York.

The Plum Island facility only has a Biosafety Level 3 rating, and according to the 2008 Farm Bill, could no longer study one of the most dangerous diseases that threatens livestock such as cattle and pigs around the world - foot-and-mouth (also known as hoof-and-mouth) disease. Foot-and-mouth disease is caused by the Aphtae epizooticae virus, and is both highly contagious and deadly to cloven-hoofed animals.

Common sense says if you were going to study diseases - really dangerous diseases - that could be transferred from animals to humans that the best place to do it might be outer space. But, let's say you were limited to doing it on the face of planet Earth, most people would say "put it on an island."

But instead, the Department of Homeland Security has decided to build a Biosafety Level 4 facility in the middle of the continent, instead of building the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility in the same location where it currently resides. It took three years for this decision to be made - when probably any small child would tell you to keep the dangerous stuff away from them.

While humans do not normally contract the disease, the hoof-and-mouth virus is known to be spread from herd to herd by contact by a different species with an infected animal, including contact with birds and humans.

Manhattan sits nearly in the middle of Kansas - and smack dab in the middle of cow country. For anyone not keeping up with history or current events, Kansas is cow country. The largest agricultural product in Kansas - cattle, representing 58% of the total agricultural sales of the state, or $4.07 billion in 2008.

The transportation crossroads for moving cattle around the country lies a mere 123 miles to the east, in Kansas City, Missouri, with a massive rail and road network tying the two cities together.

I personally have never seen a Biosafety Level 4 facility firsthand - but I have been in a Biosafety Level 3 lab. The measures you have to take to enter, and exit, such a facility are rather daunting, with the fully-sealed suits, the airlocks, UV baths, positive airflow systems, etc. How, exactly, do you move a cow in and out of such a facility?

I have to wonder - how do you keep cattle sequestered from the open air in the numbers being contemplated by this facility, with redundant air locks and air filtration systems capable of filtering out this virus? A virus that can pass nearly unimpeded through some of the finest porcelain filters manufacturable?

I've been around cattle feed lots, too. And the typical worker in a feed lot isn't going to take too keenly to all the scientific falderall associated with getting in and out of one of these places.

It gives me significant pause to ponder what could happen in Kansas - besides all of these scientists moving there from New York.

Write your Senator, write your Congressman - the facility in Manhattan isn't built yet, and the Plum Island facility is still up and running.