Friday October 26, 2001

WASHINGTON - After attacks from the air and the mail, officials worry the nation's food supply could be next. The government considers the most likely targets to be fruits and vegetables that people eat raw, and cattle that could be infected with fast-spreading foot-and-mouth disease.

To deter potential terrorists, Congress is considering proposals to hire hundreds of new food inspectors and lab technicians and empower the government to seize or recall tainted products and inspect food makers' records.

The Agriculture Department has put veterinarians on alert and wants more guards to protect its labs around the country that work with food pathogens.

"Food security can no longer be separated from our national security," Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., said yesterday.

Terrorists could poison a limited amount of food and still "create a general atmosphere of fear and anxiety without actually having to carry out indiscriminate civilian-oriented attacks,'' Peter Chalk of the Rand Corp. think tank recently told Congress.

Fresh produce may be the food most vulnerable to attack because it's often eaten raw and is subject to little inspection. The only known terrorist attack on U.S. food occurred in the 1980s, when a cult in Oregon contaminated salad bars with salmonella bacteria.

There are dozens of labs that work with pathogens, but terrorists wouldn't necessarily need to get their bacteria there. Salmonella can be found on supermarket chicken and grown in a lab. A strain of E. coli is commonly found in cattle manure.

But it would take a lot of bacteria to contaminate food, and some bugs are dangerous primarily to people who are sick or old, said Susan Sumner, an authority on food safety at Virginia Tech.

"You could pour it on stuff in the supermarket. But if your goal is to disrupt economics and make a lot of people sick you're not going to do it that way," she said.

Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, meeting with Republican lawmakers yesterday, assured them the food supply is safe.

"We have been looking at where the critical points are and taking all the precautions that we can in dealing with the private sector,'' she said.

Her biggest concern, she said, is that terrorists would contaminate a big feedlot with the virus that causes foot-and-mouth disease. It's harmless to humans but it could be devastating economically. This year's outbreak in Britain forced the slaughter of nearly 4 million animals.

The virus is not found in the United States outside of a high-security Agriculture Department lab in New York, so a terrorist would have to bring it into the country, possibly in contaminated meat.

The Bush administration has asked Congress for $106 million in emergency spending for food and agriculture security.

FDA wants to hire 410 new inspectors, lab specialists and other personnel to check fruits, vegetables and other products, primarily imports, and buy additional equipment to detect pathogens. FDA currently inspects just 1 percent of imports.

"There are clear gaps in food regulation that would certainly give the opportunity for intentionally contaminated food to be shipped widely around the U.S," said Caroline Smith DeWaal of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group. "Food moves quickly and is consumed quickly so in a short amount of time it can cause a significant outbreak.''

For consumers, the best defense against such bioterrorism is to cook foods properly, or at least to peel or wash them, said Michael Doyle, a food safety expert at the University of Georgia.

"Good food handling practices are to be considered all the time, but more so today,'' he said. "We as consumers do have a lot of control over the safety of the food we eat in that we can cook food.''

The threat of bioterrorism has renewed a push in Congress by Durbin and others to consolidate the government's food inspection system, now divided between FDA and the Agriculture Department.

FDA, which is responsible for safeguarding nearly all foods other than meat and poultry, has 750 inspectors to check 55,000 food plants. USDA has 10 times as many inspectors for just 6,000 facilities.

"The U.S., more by luck than design, has not experienced a major agricultural or food-related disaster in recent memory,'' Chalk said.