7/2/2009
MICHAEL STRAND
“There aren’t that many people,” was one of the conclusions George Teagarden and others reached several years ago when he participated in a livestock disease drill in Maryland.
Under the scenario of that drill, foot and mouth disease quickly spread across swine herds in Maryland and North Carolina.
“Within 30 days, it would have taken 700,000 people to contain it,” said Teagarden. And there just aren’t that many people available.
As Kansas livestock commissioner, Teagarden participated this past week in Topeka in a similar drill, this one involving Kansas cattle.
The scenario was part of the four-state Vigilant Guard exercise, which included Kansas, Iowa, Missouri and Nebraska in a variety of simulated terrorist attacks. It provided an opportunity for the National Guard, law enforcement, regional emergency operations staffs, firefighters, the Red Cross and others to work together.
Having learned from exercises such as the one in Maryland that “we can’t let it get that far,” Teagarden said the Kansas plan has long been “built for immediate action — hopefully we can stop it on one or two premises.”
Under the recent scenario, cattle infected with highly contagious foot and mouth disease were taken to a sale at the Farmers and Ranchers Livestock Commission sale barn in Salina, and the infection wasn’t discovered until three days later.
By that time, cattle that had been at the sale barn that day — and were potentially infected — were scattered across 40 locations in 18 counties, prompting Teagarden to issue a stop-movement order on livestock and order the state’s borders closed to livestock traffic.


Read the rest of this story in Friday's Salina Journal.