When the federal government first announced its plans to shut down the Plum Island Animal Research off the coast of Long Island and move it hundreds of miles inland to Manhattan…Kansas (Manhattan, Manhattan would be TRULY insane), many people wondered how smart of an idea that was. The Department of Homeland Security-controlled lab is notorious for being an incubator of all kinds of questionable animal-testing-related clandestine shit (there’s a theory that Lyme Disease was created there and accidentally transferred to the mainland). Is a dangerous biological warfare lab really something you want in the land of tornados and cattle?
Probably not, says Princeton scientist Laura H. Kahn, since putting a lab devised to study the foot-and-mouth cattle disease in the heart of cattle country (Kansas has 6 million cattle, thirdmost in the nation) means that there will be an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease or some other livestock disease like African swine fever at some point. Mistakes get made even at the most secure labs, Kahn notes. Kansas’ poultry industry has been rocked this month by the confirmation of bird flu.
At Plum Island, the wind blows out toward the water, so if any pathogens escaped they were swept out to sea. But putting it in Kansas means that were a tornado to tear through the lab and release the pathogens they would be quickly spread overland by a very powerful windstorm. It would be like The Stand.
There is also the threat of flash floods and fracking-induced earthquakes.
“The economic impact of a bio agricultural threat – deliberate or natural – could have a substantial effect on the food supply of this Nation and have serious human health consequences,” says a Department of Homeland Security press release announcing the first stage of construction of the new lab, inadvertently describing precisely why this is a terrible idea.
Now’s a good time to finally give up red meat.
(Photo: Noa Ansll)
