Threats to America's Dairyland: Toxins in milk supply, H-bomb secret

Move to suppress scientific paper on threats to the milk supply
is reminiscent of attempt to stop publication of H-bomb article

Here's a frightening scenario, although one that has gotten surprisingly little attention here in America's Dairyland, where milk trucks roll along the farm-to-market road system:

...[A] terrorist, using a 28-page manual called ''Preparation of Botulism Toxin'' that has been published on several jihadist Web sites and buying toxin from an overseas black-market laboratory, fills a one-gallon jug with a sludgy substance containing a few grams of botulin. He then sneaks onto a dairy farm and pours its contents into an unlocked milk tank, or he dumps it into the tank on a milk truck while the driver is eating breakfast at a truck stop.

This tainted milk is eventually piped into a raw-milk silo at a dairy-processing factory, where it is thoroughly mixed with other milk. Because milk continually flows in and out of silos, approximately 100,000 gallons of contaminated milk go through the silo before it is emptied and cleaned (the factories are required to do this only every 72 hours). While the majority of the toxin is rendered harmless by heat pasteurization, some will survive. These 100,000 gallons of milk are put in cartons and trucked to distributors and retailers, and they eventually wind up in refrigerators across the country, where they are consumed by hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting people.

It might seem hard to believe that just a few grams of toxin, much of it inactivated by pasteurization, could harm so many people. But that, in the eye of the terrorists, is the beauty of botulism: just one one-millionth of a gram may be enough to poison and eventually kill an adult. It is likely that more than half the people who drink the contaminated milk would succumb.

. . . it takes a while for botulism to take effect: usually there are no symptoms for 48 hours. So, based on studies of consumption, even if such an attack were promptly detected and the government warned us to stop drinking milk within 24 hours of the first reports of poisonings, it is likely that a third of the tainted milk would have been consumed. Worse, children would be hit hardest: they drink significantly more milk on average than adults, less of the toxin would be needed to poison them and they drink milk sooner after its release from dairy processors because it is shipped directly to schools.

And what will happen to the victims? First they will experience gastrointestinal pain, which is followed by neurological symptoms. They will have difficulty seeing, speaking and walking as paralysis sets in. Most of those who reach a hospital and get antitoxins and ventilators to aid breathing would recover, albeit after months of intensive and expensive treatment. But our hospitals simply don't have enough antitoxins and ventilators to deal with such a widespread attack, and it seems likely that up to half of those poisoned would die.

That disturbing analysis appeared in the New York Time s on May 30, written by a Stanford University professor, Lawrence M. Wein. Wein and a graduate student, Yifan Liu, spent a year on a study of how the milk processing and delivery system could be subject to a terrorist attack. Americans, Wein points out, drink 6 billion gallons of milk a year, so the potential for tampering is enormous.

Wein and Liu prepared a scientific paper on their findings, intended for publication in the online journal, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on May 30 -- the same day Wein's op ed article appeared in the Times.

The online version was posted briefly, in a password-protected area of the NAS journal's site, but quickly taken down at the request of the Dept. of Health and Human Services (HHS). An HHS official called the paper "a road map for terrorists."

NAS, a private, non-profit society of scientists and engineers chartered by Congress to advise the government on science and technology, agreed to delay publication.

'A road map for terrorists'

Stewart Simonson of HHS claimed the paper provided too much detail on potentially vulnerable areas of the milk supply, processing and distribution systems and argued that its publication "could have very serious health and national security consequences." He called the paper "a road map for terrorists."

The Academy issued a statement saying, "In response to an HHS request, PNAS and the NAS have agreed to take another look at the PNAS paper in question.""Under standard PNAS policy, the paper was originally evaluated for scientific merit and potential biosecurity issues," the statement noted. A NAS spokesman said it was committed to publishing the paper, but was "taking time to review it at a higher level of the Academy."

That further review apparently is continuing, and the paper has not been published.

Although the announcement made it seem as though publication would simply be delayed, it would not be surprising if the paper were classified and never made public, at least in its entirety.

That is true even though, in all likelihood, there is nothing in the paper that is not in the public domain already. The authors simply collected the material, assembled and analyzed it, and drew some conclusions. Wein, ironically, is barred by the rules of the NAS journal from discussing his paper before it is published.

"This is a classic example of the conundrum we face," Gerald Epstein, a biodefense expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in an interview on National Public Radio. "The pieces of information in the paper are not secret, and the type of analysis the researcher goes through isn't magical. " The paper may help someone reach the conclusion faster, but the conclusion is no big surprise, he said.

Holding up publication, after preview copies had been sent to journalists, is like "shining a huge spotlight onto it by doing a very unusual act," Epstein said. Saying it would be published and then withholding it greatly increases its exposure.

"The conclusion that any paper that might conceivably be of use to a terrorist should not be published, would shut down society," Epstein said. "We wouldn't publish road maps of cities, we wouldn't publish the periodic table, we wouldn't print math textbooks any more."

The paper was intended as a warning, to tell the Homeland Security Agency, HHS and others that the milk supply could be vulnerable to attack.

The overreaction, unfortunately, is predictable.

When Tommy Thompson was leaving office as HHS secretary, his comments that the nation's food supplies were vulnerable to terrorist attacks made him a target of criticism, even though he, too, intended it as a warning. But that was relatively minor.

The H-Bomb 'Secret'

The parallel that comes to mind is the 1979 case involving The Progressive magazine, published in Madison, Wisconsin, in the heart of America's dairyland.

The magazine, like NAS, had an article prepared for publication but circulated a few advance copies to experts.

Titled, "The H-Bomb Secret: How We Got It, Why We're Telling It," it was about how a hydrogen bomb works.

The article, by a freelance writer and activist Howard Morland, was based entirely on information available publicly. Morland and The Progressive wanted to show, in part, how ludicrous, ineffective and unnecessary some of the secrecy surrounding the nuclear weapons program was. Secrecy had been invoked by the government, in the name of national security, to keep Americans from questioning the nuclear arms race, the magazine argued.

The advance copies set off a firestorm and sent the U.S. Department of Justice running into federal court, where -- to everyone's shock -- the government obtained a court order restraining the magazine from publishing Morland's article.

It was an unprecedented case of prior restraint which flew in the face of the First Amendment to the Constitution. But conservative District Judge Robert Warren, a former Wisconsin attorney general appointed by Richard Nixon as he was leaving office, took the government at its word. This was dangerous stuff, too dangerous to publish. First Amendment be damned.

"I'd want to think a long, hard time before I'd give a hydrogen bomb to Idi Amin," Judge Warren declared, although the article would do nothing of the sort, as even he came to realize.

The government had described the article as "How to Make an H-Bomb," and said it would give the recipe to terrorists worldwide and lead to nuclear proliferation. It was not a how-to article, of course, any more than Wein's article is a terrorist manual on poisoning our milk.

The whole case had an Alice in Wonderland quality to it. The defendants -- Morland and the magazine's editors -- were gagged from discussing the article's contents. Many of the legal briefs and documents filed in the court case were classified, censored, and excluded from the public record. The defendants and their lawyers had to be cleared to read some of the documents. Sometimes the lawyers were not allowed to tell their clients what was in the filings. Judge Warren, at one point, issued a secret opinion that the defendants were not permitted to read.

Meanwhile, the government stamped "classified" on documents that had been public, and even closed a library where some of the newly-secret documents had been on public display the day before.

The Progressive eventually prevailed when the essentia lH-bomb information -- the "secret" in the article -- was sent to newspapers by a California "hobbyist" researcher, Chuck Hansen, who independently found many of the "secrets" in the public domain and sent a letter to newspapers outlining his findings. Hansen's letter was published by the Madison Press Connection, a strike newspaper, and later by others.

That gave the government a graceful way to drop its case, saving itself the embarrassment of a reversal after having to make its arguments in front of judges who had heard of the Constitution.

And Idi Amin never got his H-bomb.

The H-bomb article was a conflict between freedom of the press and national security. The milk paper is a conflict between scientific freedom and national security.

If the nation could survive the H-bomb secret, it should be able to handle publication of Professor Wein's paper on threats to the nation's milk supply.

Coverage:
CNN
AP
NYTimes op ed
Sciencentral News

UPDATE: "NAS Publishes the Milk-Bomb Secret."