The owner of a South African engineering company accused of bioterrorist threats against the United States and the United Kingdom will go on trial next month, reports the Global Security Newswire.
Brian Roach is charged with threatening to release strains of foot and mouth disease in the U.K. and U.S. if those governments declined to pay his $4 million demand. Roach considered his virus release plan “remuneration for white Zimbabwean farmers” forced to give up land in 2000, according to the Global Security report.
Foot and mouth disease, also known as hoof-and-mouth disease, occurs in cattle and other animals and results in fever and blisters. It causes the animals to lose appetite, sometimes to the point of death. Read more about foot and mouth disease.
The disease is sometimes confused with a virus known as hand, foot and mouth disease, which is a common viral illness in infancy and adolescence, according to the Center for Disease Control.
While foot and mouth disease does not affect humans directly, it can – and already has in the past – affected humans indirectly. An outbreak would leave the livestock industry in disarray, through damaging blows to milk and meat production.
“It’s very easy to cause an outbreak because it’s so highly contagious,” said UCLA biosecurity and emergency preparedness expert Dr. Peter Katona.
This is because the cattle industry is so geographically spread out.
“Cattle are put together in these feed lots that have 100,000 cattle and within days they are around the country. It would spread really, really fast,” he said.
Katona suspects there would be large economic fallout from a massive and fast spread of the disease. It wouldn’t just affect cattle in waves, but other livestock like pigs and goats.
Of the utmost concern in the case of the angry white South African farmer accused of bioterrorism: If he – or any terrorist – actually released foot and mouth disease, how much damage would it do to national security?
In the case of a release of foot and mouth, the U.S. and other governments have vaccines capable of combating the harmful affects of the disease on livestock.
But that was the case ten years ago when foot and mouth disease devastated rural farmers and livestock in England. Here’s a report from a study conducted after that outbreak.
- Rachel Keegan/Creative Commons License
In that case, the U.K. government opted out of using a vaccination on livestock, concerned that it would deter countries from exporting its meat.
What’s interesting to note is that researchers at Lancaster University studied the psychosocial affect the disease had on rural citizens in England. Researchers concluded, after 18 months of rigorous research, that farm workers and health experts alike dealt with “severe distress” during the outbreak.
“It’s important to understand that in a disease free country, the social and economic impact of a large scale foot and mouth disease epidemic is huge, as the UK learned to its cost in 2001,” Maggie Mort, one of the leading researchers from the decade ago Lancaster study, told me in an e-mail.
Consider the following quote from a final report the British government funded. It comes from the diary of an Environmental Agency worker immersed in the foot and mouth disease epidemic:
“I’ll never be able to look at a cow or a sheep again without seeing blood pouring out of the hole in its head, […] maybe I will in time…I walked, walking along the pier one night […] I did actually think about jumping in… I felt so bad about myself.”
As the history in the U.K. indicates, a severe threat to the livestock affects more than just the livestock. It also compromises the livelihood of people who earn a living working in the livestock industry, depending on if those people are connected to the animals they work alongside.
In the pending case, Brian Roach was scheduled to go on trial earlier, but the extension allowed South African police time for further investigations.
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More on the story:
*Dr. Maggie Mort’s article in the British Medical Journal
*PBS report on the 2001 foot and mouth epidemic
