I've been reading this 2004 book by Michael Christopher Carroll called "Lab 257" which concerns the aging crumbling germ warfare laboratory located on Plum Island just off the coast of Long Island and very close to the Hamptons. It is no longer used but it was open for business long after it was decrepit and very unsafe as a containment unit for the germs and viruses it stored and experimented with. In fact, they can't knock it down because of the danger of agents escaping.

The book details how such diseases as Lyme, West Nile Virus, and Dutch Duck Plague likely arose. All started in the general vicinity of Plum Island. Lyme was transmitted via tick and Plum Island worked extensively with ticks as vectors for carrying disease (and finding them extremely effective). In fact, Carroll visited Plum Island six times and once retured infested with ticks which he frantically removed and could do nothing but wait a few agonizing days to see if he had any unusual symptoms but nothing happened. Dutch Duck plague wiped out the many duck farms for which Long Island was once famous in the late 60s. I also wonder about Legionaires' Disease which Carroll does not discuss. How did that arise so sudden in so specific a locale as a single hotel in Philadelphia? It still occasionally crops up mysteriously. For that matter, what about AIDS? That too seemed to suddenly crop up.

But what really scared me in the book was the revelation of just how easy it would be to bring the United States to its knees by attacking our food supply. It is, in fact, amazing that no one has tried and only makes it inevitable that someone eventually will. This is known in DHS parlance as "agroterrorism."

But what is the Bush administration doing about agroterrorism? Very little because there isn't much that can be done. All kinds of used, cheap lab equipment is available all over the internet and can be purchased quite without anyone noticing. Someone with a little knowledge of germ warfare knows what equipment to get.

Then the germs must be purchased. That must be the real bitch trying to obtain, right? Wrong. Kooks and terrorists have been able to obtain germs and viruses with nothing more than phony letterhead on a handwritten message for various sample germs or viruses. The writer need only claim to be a researcher at some lab and write in the lingo that makes him sound like a legitimate researcher and the samples will more likely be sent than not, no questions asked, no screen or background check. If this sounds too risky just make your own bioagents with the gene recipes available online and have the genetic snippets mailed to you. If this sounds too risky, just go to places in Europe, Asia or Africa and collect your own samples of rinderpest, anthrax, foot-and-mouth disease, Rift Valley fever virus, SARS, Ebola, malaria, bird flu. Whatever is available that can do damage. Agents are more effective if they are zoonotic (can be transmitted from animal to human) but don't have to be and can still work extremely effectively.

You can order various vaccines from feedstores. These are vaccines for cattle but you can inject them into your own body and without much worse effect than a sore arm. That way if you spill an agent on you (and you will), you'll be protected.

The germ or virus will be "bred" in your makeshit laboratory and turned into a liquid slurry and then collected in test tubes, ampoules or vials. Take your dirty bomb someplace no one will be surveilling such as an ordinary truckstop. Wait until a truck hauling pigs or cattle pulls in. Such trucks are very plentiful on the roads and the trailer housing the animals is always open to the outside like a pen or stall. When the driver goes in for a sandwich and coffee, pull up alongside his truck, exit your vehicle, pull out the vial of agent, uncork it and fling it into the trailer, splattering animals like a priest blessing his flock with an aspergillum. Then leave.

Within a few days, the effects will begin to be felt. Something like foot & mouth disease, anthrax, mad cow, tuberculosis, polio, Rift Valley fever and a host of other diseases could devastate our food supply in a very short time. Livestock is transported very quickly in great numbers all over the U.S. in a matter of days. A typical stockyard for cattle usually processes a million head per quarter. Tens of thousands of pigs transported over thousands of miles from all over the country in only a few days are mixed indiscrimately in huge sale barns. The contaminated animals would thoroughly mix with the general population spreading contamination long before anyone knew anything was wrong. A very large number of these animals would be processed for slaughter and the meat distributed around the country to anyone who orders it.

Within weeks, grocery stores, restaurants, delis, etc would be closed and the food rigorously tested or confiscated and destroyed. Meat around the nation would have to be yanked off store shelves and out of freezers. 13% of our gross domestic product would go down the drain virtually overnight. The effects on the economy would be utterly ruinous. The population would panic at the thinning store shelves and buy whatever foods were still available and hoard it. Prices would be exorbitant. Job loss would be staggering. Small farms would be shutdown overnight. Our food-producing capabilities would be utterly halted.

All this independent of what the disease will do to the population assuming it is zoonotic. Rift Valley fever, bubonic plague or a particularly virulent strain of flu could kill thousands and even millions nationally or globally (swine flu killed 25 million worldwide in 1918).

One could also sprinkle dairy cows with agent in an open pasture. Would you be seen? No. Sale barns, stockyards, grazing lands, processing plants, etc. don't have very good security, especially against acts of agroterrorism. In fact, it is fair to say it is non-existent.

And this is with just a single vial of agent manufactured in your own home. Emptying, say, four vials--one on cattle, one on pigs, one on poultry and one in milk (very desirable because agents thrive very well while suspended in milk and it would be easy to contaminate dairy cows as I have pointed out)--would be utterly stoppable and monstrously devastating in just about every way imaginable.

Thanks to Bush's invasion of Iraq, al-Qaeda has evolved into a rather sophisticated organization and we know they are testing out various forms of biowarfare such as smearing agents on doorknobs. One confiscated videotape in a raid of an al-Qaeda cell showed two dogs being injected with an agent that caused them to die agonizing deaths in a few minutes time.

I think attempting limited nuclear war might unleash such a fate upon us. But it could come at any time. If enough people try to destroy our food supply, one of them is bound to succeed sooner or later.