MIKE HENDRICKS COMMENTARY
What a nightmare.
Fell asleep reading that new report about risks of building that bio-defense lab on the K-State campus in Manhattan — and oh so close to the football stadium.
Woke up with this scary vision: 50,000 wild-eyed K-State fans streaming out after a game, having all breathed in highly contagious foot-and-mouth disease.
Mind you, humans can’t catch the disease, only farm animals.
But think of the risk to Wildcats fans’ significant others back home! 
Yes, a little joke there for KU fans in the audience. Now, we segue to the serious. According to the National Research Council, there really is a threat that football fans, students and researchers could carry home the highly contagious virus on their clothes and in their lungs should the disease escape from the proposed National Bio- and Agro-Defense Facility.
Absent added safety precautions, the council rates the chance at 70 percent within 50 years, perhaps crippling the livestock industry and affecting the food supply.
This is the third study to warn of risks of building a facility that studies highly contagious livestock diseases such as foot-and-mouth in the midst of one of the most livestock-intensive regions of the country.
In 2008, the Government Accountability Office questioned whether the feds had sufficient evidence to prove “that food and mouth disease research can be done safely on the U.S. mainland” at all.
(It’s now done on an island off the New York coast.)
Naturally, area politicians pooh-poohed this latest report as they did the others. Intoxicated by the $650 million federal project, the state’s six-member congressional delegation all but shrugged off its findings:
“We are confident this facility will be the safest research laboratory in the world,” a joint statement said.
Remember last year when some of these same folks quivered at the thought of terror suspects being moved from Guantanamo to the military prison at Fort Leavenworth?
Among the reasons Sen. Pat Roberts gave for his opposition: that an island facility was less of a security threat than one smack in the Midwest at a “campus-style facility” like Fort Leavenworth.
Hey, but as for spending hundreds of millions moving a potentially risky research operation from an island to the middle of the country on an actual university campus, why worry?
Roberts, Sam Brownback and the rest are only too willing to set aside caution when the dollars are big enough. That and they worry Texas might steal the project.
Still, what’s wrong with a little caution? Unless you’d rather put your trust in politicians rather than scientists.
To reach Mike Hendricks, call 816-234-7708 or send e-mail to
[email protected].
Posted on Tue, Nov. 16, 2010 11:16 PM
Read more:
http://www.kansascity.com/2010/11/16/2441851/three-studies-warn-about-that.html#ixzz15Z9oCwEN
