The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is conducting several projects concerning foreign animal disease (FAD) pathogens, agricultural terrorism, and agriculture disaster management. These projects will help define the EPA's supporting role in the agricultural emergency response efforts led by the Department of Agriculture's (USDA's) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS). The EPA's National Homeland Security Research Center (NHSRC) is coordinating its efforts with the EPA's Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response and the Office of Prevention, Pesticides and Toxic Substances.

Plant and Animal Disposal Best Practices Handbook

With support from the Department of Defense's Technical Support Working Group (TSWG) and with technical guidance from USDA/APHIS and the EPA, researchers from Texas A&M University are developing a best practices handbook to help decision makers and emergency planners handle the large-scale disposal of contaminated agricultural products. Several of the project scientists are from Texas A&M's National Center for Foreign Animal and Zoonotic Disease Defense, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) National Center of Excellence.

The Handbook on Best Practices and Guidelines for Contaminated Plant and Animal Disposal covers the following disposal methods: thermal destruction, burial/landfilling, composting, rendering, alkaline hydrolysis, digestion, anaerobic digestion, and ocean disposal. The handbook includes biosecurity/safety, environmental, regulatory, infrastructure, and economic factors, and follows a comprehensive literature review of animal carcass disposal published in 2004 by the National Agricultural Biosecurity Center Consortium Carcass Disposal Working Group. The project includes an exercise option to transform the handbook into a software tool that permits the user to identify and enter data to create bioterror/natural disaster scenarios.

Transportable Agricultural Waste Gasifier Prototype

EPA personnel recently started building a prototype mobile gasifier that can process 25 tons of biologically contaminated agricultural waste per day. The dual-chamber unit can be trucked into contaminated areas and can incinerate any diseased plant or animal material at temperatures greater than 850°C, leaving only inert, pathogen-free ash residues and producing minimal air emissions. The unit, intended to destroy prions and all less hardy biological agents, will then undergo performance testing.

Avian Influenza Virus Persistence and Decontamination

EPA researchers are studying the persistence of the highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI and AI) virus on several types of outdoor materials under varying ambient conditions (i.e., temperature, relative humidity, and ultraviolet level). They plan to conduct decontamination experiments where persistence occurs and test low-pathogenic AI under the same conditions to assess its use as a surrogate for the HPAI. A literature review of AI persistence in the environment is also under way. The EPA is also investigating the use of low-cost, widely available, noncorrosive, minimal-impact decontamination agents.

Prion Surrogate Development

Sufficient disposal infrastructure must be in place to handle routine animal mortalities and to manage carcass disposal resulting from emergency response activities. The effectiveness of large-scale disposal technologies must be tested while deactivating the thermally and chemically resistant prions that cause transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs), such as mad-cow disease. The EPA is working on a surrogate prion to safely assess the effectiveness and environmental impacts of large-scale carcass disposal technologies. If a technology can deactivate TSE-causing prions, all viruses and bacteria of concern can effectively be dealt with.

For more information, visit the NHSRC website at www.epa.gov/nhsrc, or the National Agriculture Compliance Assistance Center's website at www.epa.gov/agriculture.

For more information: Paul Lemieux, 919-541-0962, lemieux.paul@epa.gov