In the last chapter (entitled “Death”) of her new book, Dolly Mixtures, Sarah Franklin comments in interesting ways on the food and mouth crisis of 2001 and the so-called slaughter policy.
Though this isn’t confirmed yet, it might be an interesting biosecurity story to follow. From NYTimes, “An investigation, ordered by Prime Minister Gordon Brown, on Tuesday concluded that the spread of foot-and-mouth disease among livestock at two farms in southern England was probably caused by human movement from nearby laboratory facilities that was either “accidental or deliberate.””
One key debate in Britain is whether to vaccinate all livestock. The issue is that once a nation’s livestock is vaccinated, there can be non-symptomatic carriers of disease. This then poses a threat to other national herds when animals or animal products are traded. Thus, if Britain goes ahead with vaccination, “it would immediately lose its designation as a country free of foot-and-mouth disease.” Article below.
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Melinda Cooper recently drew my attention to an interesting study conducted by Harvard Medical School Center and sponsored by Swiss Re and the United Nations Development Programme. The study predicts that “climate change will significantly affect the health of humans and ecosystems and these impacts will have economic consequences.” In addition, the study attempts to “survey” existing and future costs of climate change. It argues that the insurance industry “will be at the center of this issue, absorbing risk and helping society and business to adapt and reduce new risks.”
A recent series of NY Times articles has tracked novel risks emerging from the global food and drug supply chain. China, as has been mentioned before, seems to be the key source of threat. The major issue is that given the complexities of the supply chain (and the practice of erasing the original suppliers in order to protect the middleman) there is no way of tracking where ingredients come from - such as glycerin in toothpaste - and so if it turns out that there are dangerous counterfeit supplies, it is impossible to locate and punish the offending supplier. From the vantage of VSS, what is significant is both the sense that a global food and drug supply system generates novel risks, and the emerging demand to regulate this “global pipeline” of pharmaceutical and food ingredients. Developing a reliable tracking system will be a crucial step. There are similarities here to the solution proposed by Stephen Flynn to the problem of the uncertain origin of shipping containers - or to current European efforts to track the origins of GM foods, as described in this article by Javier Lezaun.
On “From China to Panama, a Trail of Poisoned Medicine”: As with many of the vital systems security domains, the creation of modern medical infrastructure produces new vulnerabilities. Contaminated medicine is its own “epidemic”. Also interesting is the contemporary configuration of medical contamination and counterfeiting as a ‘global’ problem: “This is really a global problem, and it needs to be handled in a global way,” said Dr. Henk Bekedam, the World Health Organization’s top representative in Beijing. The exact chemical (diethylene glycol) culpable in Panama’s deaths killed over 100 people in the U.S. SEVENTY years ago, leading to the creation of the FDA. What security measures will be put in place on a global scale?
Here’s an excellent article in today’s New York Times on the drugs that are in your water.
The recent confirmation of an outbreak of salmonella in peanut butter (Peter Pan and Great Value brands) demonstrates another weakness in U.S. disease surveillance. This CDC announcement details the process by which a food-borne disease outbreak is detected, confirmed, and tracked.
“PulseNet (the national subtyping network for foodborne disease surveillance coordinated by CDC) detected a slowly rising increase in cases of Salmonella Tennessee this fall. OutbreakNet (the national network of public health officials coordinated by CDC that investigates enteric disease outbreaks) then worked for several weeks to identify this unusual food vehicle. Public health officials from several states have isolated Salmonella from open jars of peanut butter of both Peter Pan and Great Value brand. For nine jars, the serotype has been confirmed as Tennessee and DNA fingerprinting has shown that the pattern is the outbreak strain.”
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This is an excellent empirical paper on precaution: Henry F. Rothstein (2004) Precautionary Bans or Sacrificial Lambs? Participative Risk Regulation and the Reform of the UK Food Safety Regime. Rothstein presents a case study that works nicely as a contrast to and complement of Ewald’s work.