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Opinion & Comment: Improving resilience
Posted by: JimEdwards on May 06, 2004 - 05:32 PM
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Source: The Vet Record COMMENT 8th May 2004
A DEBATE at last year’s BVA Congress drew attention to the need to be prepared for the possibility of a terrorist attack involving biological agents directed at animals, and suggested that the best way to counter any threat was to have effective systems in place for responding to exotic disease outbreaks generally. Subsequently, a report from the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, on ‘The scientific response to terrorism’, suggested that the Government was being ‘unnecessarily secretive’ in its approach to countering bioterrorism – a claim strenuously denied by the Government. Now, the Royal Society has joined the debate, with a policy document entitled ‘Making the UK safer: detecting and decontaminating chemical and biological agents’. Like the report from the Science and Technology Committee, the Royal Society’s document does not deal specifically with the possibility of attacks against animals; rather, it suggests that this merits separate study, and also refers to its 2002 report on infectious diseases of livestock. Nevertheless, it is well worth reading the document, if only to consider the extent to which its observations and recommendations might also apply in the field of animal health.
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