An Infeasible Assumption and Limited Information Hinder Veterinarian Workforce Planning Efforts for a Catastrophic Outbreak of Foot-and-Mouth Disease

DHS has two efforts under way that involve identifying the veterinarian workforce needed to quickly perform rapid diagnoses and other essential activities during a large-scale outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, but both efforts have shortcomings.

However, this effort is based on a national planning scenario that USDA and DHS officials' say includes an infeasible assumption. The scenario, developed by a White House Homeland Security Council working group in 2006, involves the mass slaughter of all potentially exposed animals. This “stamping out” method is the same one the United States has used in the past for eradicating smaller outbreaks of foreign animal diseases, but under this scenario, it would result in the slaughter of almost half the nation's beef, dairy, and swine. DHS and USDA officials, as well as state officials who have conducted large-scale foot-and-mouth disease exercises, consider this stamping out method infeasible because, among other things, it would lead to serious logistical and environmental concerns, would not be tolerated by the public, and could wipe out a viable livestock industry. As a result, DHS and USDA officials told us, any workforce estimates produced from this effort are not relevant.

DHS and USDA officials told us that to arrive at more relevant workforce estimates, the United States would have to consider alternatives to stamping out for outbreaks as large as the one depicted in the national planning scenario. For example, some countries protect against and control foot-and-mouth disease using vaccines. There are numerous reasons the United States has not used this approach, including limitations to vaccine technology.¹ However USDA, DHS, and state officials recognize that newer, more promising vaccines may play an important role in controlling a catastrophic outbreak. DHS officials also told us that they are looking into revising the Homeland Security Council's planning scenario to make it a more useful planning tool.

For its second effort to identify the veterinarian workforce needed during a foot-and-mouth disease outbreak, DHS has contracted with the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to create a decision support system that models various foot-and-mouth disease outbreak scenarios. This effort includes estimating the number and type of workforce needed for responding to outbreaks, both with and without vaccination. However, according to the project leader, modeling efforts could be improved if certain information were available. For example, in order to model workforce needs for a response that includes the use of vaccines without subsequent stamping out, known as “vaccinate to live,” it is important to know what segments of the livestock industry might use such a strategy, and under what circumstances, and how animals and animal products would be identified and their movement tracked. Because the concept of vaccinate to live is new in the United States, USDA has yet to detail in contingency response plans how it would employ this concept, according to agency officials.

Moreover, data limitations make it difficult for any computer modeling effort to accurately predict the spread of the disease. Specifically, modelers must estimate the number and location of animals, as well as their interaction with other segments of industry, because the United States does not have a mandatory, national system that identifies the location and tracks the movement of livestock.² Instead, modelers currently use outdated county-level data from USDA's National Agricultural Statistical Survey census, reducing the accuracy of predictions about the spread of foot-and-mouth disease. Also, without knowing the exact location of livestock, it is difficult to understand the interaction between livestock and wildlife. Limited data and information on the number and movement of wildlife and the susceptibility of wildlife populations to the virus further complicates matters, according to agency officials. This is an important gap, since foot-and-mouth disease has been known to spread from livestock to wildlife in past outbreaks. In fact, the last time the United States had an outbreak was in California in the 1920s, when the virus spread from pigs to cattle and black-tailed deer. It took 2 years and the slaughter of 22,000 deer to eradicate the disease from a local deer population in one national park. In areas where livestock graze extensively, there is potential for interaction with susceptible species, such as deer and feral pigs. According to the project leader, as well as USDA and DHS officials, control and eradication strategies would be greatly complicated if wildlife became infected and could require more veterinarians and different expertise.

End Notes

¹ For more information on why the United States has not used vaccines, see GAO-05-214.

² To understand the issues and our recommendations for helping the United States implement an

animal identification system, see GAO, National Animal Identification System: USDA Needs to Resolve Several Key Implementation Issues to Achieve Rapid and Effective Disease Traceback, GAO-07-592 (Washington, D.C.: July 6, 2007).