A really, really, really bad idea.

Sometimes the government still surprises me with their apparent reckless desire to destroy everything. This is one of those times. Fresh from admitting that there were accidents at Plum Island, they want to build a new center for animal disease research. Next to land where there are herds of cattle and a wildlife preserve. Yay!

And don't forget the possibility that Plum Island might be where Lyme disease spread out from. Tinfoil hatty or not, it is true that tick borne diseases were being studied there for use in wartime, and that Plum Island is only 6 miles across Long Island Sound from Lyme- deer swim to Block Island, and that's 12 miles offshore.

"...former Plum Island lab director Jerry Callis talking about tick research on Plum Island:
"Plum Island experimented with ticks, but never outside of containment. We had a tick colony where you take them and feed them on the virus and breed ticks to see how many generations it would last, on and on, until its diluted. Recently they reinstated the tick colony."

"In the book, The Belarus Secret, author John Luftis, the Justice Department employee who exposed Kurt Waldheim as a Nazi, states that Nazi germ warfare scientists had experimented with poison ticks dropped from planes to spread rare diseases. Loftus also states that he had received information that the United States had tested some of these poison ticks on the Plum Island artillery range off the coast of Connecticut during the early part of the 1950s." LINK to wikipedia on Erich Traub

"Mr. Carroll argues that outbreaks of the Dutch duck plague virus that devastated duck farms on eastern Long Island in the 1960's, Lyme disease in 1975, West Nile virus in 1999 and the mysterious 1999 disease that killed most of the lobsters in Long Island Sound all occurred too suspiciously close to Plum Island to dismiss the possibility of a laboratory link. " LINK to NYT

"The only U.S. facility allowed to research the highly contagious foot-and-mouth disease experienced several accidents with the feared virus, the Bush administration acknowledged Friday.
...The Homeland Security Department told a House committee there were other accidents inside the government's laboratory.
The accidents are significant because the administration is likely to move foot-and-mouth research from the remote island to one of five sites on the U.S. mainland near livestock herds."
LINK to article about accidents at Plum Island


"The Bush administration is likely to move its research on one of the most contagious animal diseases from an isolated island laboratory to the U.S. mainland near herds of livestock, raising concerns about a catastrophic outbreak.
...One such government report, produced last year and already turned over to lawmakers by the Homeland Security Department, combined commercial satellite images and federal farm data to show the proximity to livestock herds of locations that have been considered for the new lab. "Would an accidental laboratory release at these locations have the potential to affect nearby livestock?" asked the nine-page document. It did not directly answer the question.
A simulated outbreak of the disease — part of an earlier U.S. government exercise called "Crimson Sky" — ended with fictional riots in the streets after the simulation's National Guardsmen were ordered to kill tens of millions of farm animals, so many that troops ran out of bullets. In the exercise, the government said it would have been forced to dig a ditch in Kansas 25 miles long to bury carcasses. In the simulation, protests broke out in some cities amid food shortages.

...An epidemic in 2001 devastated Britain's livestock industry, as the government slaughtered 6 million sheep, cows and pigs. Last year, in a less serious outbreak, Britain's health and safety agency concluded the virus probably escaped from a site shared by a government research center and a vaccine maker. Other outbreaks have occurred in Taiwan in 1997 and China last year and in 2006.

If even a single cow signals an outbreak in the U.S., emergency plans permit the government to shut down all exports and movement of livestock. Herds would be quarantined, and a controlled slaughter could be started to stop the disease from spreading." LINK to article about creating new facility