IT Milk: entry

We were assigned an article titled Food as a Weapon for critical review in Professor McGill’s SRA 311 class. A summary is provided below. As I was reading through this article I couldn’t help but notice that this is sensitive information that could be directly utilized as a handbook for terrorists.

If shock value was the objective of the authors, then they throughly succeeded because I am now pretty nervous about what I could possibly be ingesting with every bite of food. But, probably without the intention, the authors have also potentially jeopardized national security by publishing this article. Professor McGill noted in class today that this article has been removed from the internet and banned soon after the publication for this very reason.

Source

Lee, Richard V., Harbison, Raymond D., Draughon, F. Ann. 2003. Food as a Weapon. Food Protection Trends 23: 664-674.

About the authors

Richard V. Lee practices Internal Medicine in Buffalo, NY and was part of the Department of Medicine at SUNY Buffalo at the time of writing. Raymond D. Harbison is an expert of toxicology and contributes to the Center for Risk Analysis and Management in the University of Southern Florida. Ann F. Draughon is an expert on food microbiology and is co-director of the Food Safety Center of Excellence at the University of Tennessee. The authors of this article are together a well-rounded group of experts to comment on the topic of food terrorism.

Summary

Can food be used as a weapon? This article explains in detail how to weaponize food with common everyday agents and informs the reader about the high vulnerability of the US food system to malicious attacks.

An extensive list of descriptive tables is provided in the article with various agents that can be utilized for food terrorism. Food terrorism offers great return on investment for terrorists because it is cheap and effective. For instance, the article discusses “the low cost of producing mycotoxins and the ease of accessibility to pathogens, poisons, and pesticides.” (p. 665) In addition, being caught with food terrorism is highly unlikely because it is difficult to distinguish from naturally occurring food borne illnesses. While very difficult to achieve and manage, tightened security around the sources and transfer points of food is the only realistic defense against this form of bioterrorism.

If the author’s point of view is correct, then food terrorism should be upgraded to the highest priority on the national defense plan because the current food system is extremely vulnerable. If executed astutely by terrorists, one instance of food terrorism could affect the majority of the US population and instill overwhelming fear and panic.

Read the full article