Inside the Bungled Bird Flu Response, Where Profits Collide With Public Health
The US Department of Agriculture’s headquarters are situated on a tony stretch of DC real estate, a world away from the nation’s farms. So when something goes seriously wrong on America’s plains and pastures, something that could threaten animal safety or food production, USDA officials rely on rural veterinarians to sound the alarm.
Those vets report findings to state veterinarians, whose doors and inboxes are always open. They even post their cell phone numbers online. The state veterinarians, in turn, utilize a network of diagnostic laboratories approved by the USDA, chief among them the National Veterinary Services Laboratories (NVSL) in Ames, Iowa.
This close-knit network, with built-in redundancies, is primed to tackle the awful and unexpected, whether it’s foot-and-mouth disease, swine fever, or an act of agroterrorism. There’s little standing on ceremony, and state veterinarians generally feel free to reach out directly to leading USDA officials. “If we want information, we go up the chain to the top,” says Beth Thompson, South Dakota’s state veterinarian.
That, at least, is how it’s supposed to work. It’s how veterinarians responding to dairy farms in the Texas panhandle earlier this year assumed it would work when they stumbled upon hellish scenes out of a horror movie. Feverish cows in respiratory distress producing trickles of milk. Dying cats. Enough dead barn pigeons and blackbirds to suggest a mass poisoning. Living birds with twisted necks, their heads tilted skyward.
