Committee is urging beefed-up protection
A national commission working on shoring up the country’s preparedness for biological threats, intentional or naturally occurring, is in Fort Collins to hear what should be done to protect agriculture and how farmers, ranchers and others on the front lines can help.
The privately funded Bipartisan Commission for Biodefense is meeting at Colorado State University on Tuesday. Members of the commission, which started in 2014, include former U.S. Sens. Joe Lieberman and Tom Daschle and Tom Ridge, former governor of Pennsylvania and Department of Homeland Security secretary.
Congress and federal agencies have incorporated several of the commission’s recommendations to prevent problems and detect and respond to disease outbreaks, cyberattacks, terrorist attacks and other catastrophes.
The meeting at CSU is focused on potential threats to agriculture and the consequences of a widespread disease outbreak among livestock or crops.
“This is a field that covers threats to essentially human health, animal health, environmental health” and the economy, said Alan Rudolph, CSU vice president for research. “It’s a recognition of the increasing frequency of outbreaks associated with pathogens or infectious diseases. It sort of mirrors the story line of how our antibiotics have become less effective.”
During the past few years, the U.S. poultry and pig industries have experienced serious disease outbreaks, Rudolph said.
“And now China is experiencing the largest outbreak of pork disease, called African swine fever, in which it’s estimated that 30 to 50% of China’s pig population will be lost,” Rudolph added.
The World Health Organization has said that about a quarter of the world’s pigs could die as a result, leading to food shortages and shortfalls in products made from pigs, including medicines.
Besides food and health risks, widespread threats to agriculture can wreak economic havoc, Rudolph said.
“These are billion-dollar or more losses in the ag sector, with a significant amount of jobs and our economy being driven by agriculture,” Rudolph said.
In Colorado, agriculture contributes about $40 billion annually to the state’s economy, making it the second-largest economic sector. The Colorado Department of Agriculture said the state has more than 38,000 farms, encompassing nearly 32 million acres and supporting more than 170,000 jobs.
The biodefense commission is meeting in Fort Collins in part because of CSU’s work and research on infectious diseases and animal and plant health, said Asha George, the organization’s executive director. Members also want to focus on states and local communities involved with agriculture.
“They’ll be among the first that will have to respond if we have some sort of agriculture incident,” George said. “And their economies are going to be the ones hit the worst with any sort of outbreak.”
Rudolph said CSU has a long history of working on infectious diseases. The campus is also home to a U.S Department of Agriculture Animal Plant and Health Inspection Service facility and the federal Centers for Disease Control’s second-largest research laboratory, he said.
The Fort Collins campus is “the Fort Knox” of data on crop and livestock genetics, Rudolph said.
The National Laboratory for Genetic
Resource Preservation and the National Animal Germplasm Program, both USDA programs, are on the CSU campus.
The programs are a collection of the “foundation genetics of our crops and livestock in the country,” Rudolph said.
There are increasing concerns about cyberattacks on those kinds of facilities, he added.
Also on the campus is BioMARC, a nonprofit contract manufacturing service owned and operated by CSU. The facility produces products, including vaccines and diagnostic tests, for clinical and commercial use.
Rudolph said he will tell the commission about a coalition that CSU and five other land-grant universities in the West have formed to pool information and efforts to prevent epidemics and other threats to livestock and crops.
Land-grant schools were started with revenue from land the federal government gave states and had a mission to teach agriculture and the mechanical arts.
The Colorado State University Extension has a person in every county in the state to work with farmers and ranchers in a variety of areas, including new technology and management practices, Rudolph said. The coalition sees outreach on biodefense as another program the extension service can offer.