Dear Dubya,
Why do you hate steak?
and marshmallows, footballs, anti-freeze, photo film and soap? and milkshakes and straws and paper cups and pharmaceuticals and really really cute shooooz? Cuz alla those things are byproducts of the Beef Industry.
And this will greatly endanger it:
...A simulated outbreak of the disease — 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.
...possible locations for the new National Bio-and Agro-Defense Facility are Athens, Ga. Manhattan, Kan. Butner, N.C. San Antonio TX, and Flora, Miss.
...The new site could be selected later this year, and the lab would open by 2014. The numbers of livestock in the counties and surrounding areas of the finalists range from 542,507 in Kansas to 132,900 in Georgia, according to the Homeland Security study.
...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, N.Y., for more than a half-century — far from commercial livestock. The existing lab is 100 miles northeast of New York City in the Long Island Sound, accessible only by ferry or helicopter.
..."I would like to believe we could build a facility, with the knowledge and technology we have available, that would be basically safe from a bio-security standpoint,” said John Stuedemann, a cattle farmer near Athens, Ga., and a former scientist at the Agriculture Department.
...The Homeland Security Department says laboratory animals would not be corralled outside the new facility, and they would not come into contact with local livestock. All work with the virus and lab waste would be handled securely and any material leaving would be treated and monitored to ensure it was sterilized.
Yeah. *I* would like to believe that I could eat chocolate cake all day and never gain an ounce, Mr Studemann. *I* would like to believe that everything will be unicorns and puppies. And that, as well, has no effect on the reality of the situation.
But if you recall the reason that dang HSD was invented in the first place you might realize that a problem is more likely than less. “Basically safe” is insufficient when you’re talking about billions of dollars and millions of jobs.
Oh, and it’s “cattle ranchers”—even in GA.
putz.
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