Bush admin wants to move animal disease lab to area near livestock herds
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- Conniepae
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more from Green:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/04/11/bush-admin-wants-to-move_n_9...
Can we afford to risk our farm animals? What if they are wrong? They weren't really prepared for a major hurricane and we have seen how that turned out. People are still living in trailers. Many families will never return home.Foot-and-mouth virus can be carried on a worker's breath or clothes, or vehicles leaving a lab, and is so contagious it has been confined to Plum Island since the research began. The existing lab is 100 miles northeast of New York City in the Long Island Sound. Researchers there who work with the live virus are not permitted to own animals at home that would be susceptible, and they must wait at least one week after work before attending outside events where such animals might perform, such as a circus.
Plum Island Animal Disease Center Building 257, closed in 1995, sits fenced and boarded up on Plum Island off of the east coast of New York's Long Island, in this Feb. 16, 2004 file photo. The Bush administration plans to move its research on one of the most feared animal diseases from an isolated island laboratory to a new facility on the U.S. mainland near herds of livestock, raising concerns about the possibility of an economically catastrophic outbreak. (AP Photo/Ed Betz, File)
WASHINGTON — The only U.S. facility allowed to research the highly contagious foot-and-mouth disease experienced several accidents with the feared virus, the Bush administration acknowledged Friday.
A simulated outbreak of the disease in 2002 _ part of an earlier U.S. government exercise called "Crimson Sky" _ ended with fictional riots in the streets after the simulation's National Guardsmen were ordered to kill tens of millions of farm animals, so many that troops ran out of bullets. In the exercise, the government said it would have been forced to dig a ditch in Kansas 25 miles long to bury carcasses. In the simulation, protests broke out in some cities amid food shortages.
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ocanada
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This is exemplary of the dirth of scientific misunderstanding within the current administration.
- 1 year ago
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ocanada
