Animal Disease Lab and Property on Plum Island New York for Sale?

According to a report written by the Associated Press's Frank Eltman and contributed to by AP writer Cristian Salazar on May 20, 2010, New York's Plum Island, which houses an animal disease and research laboratory, is scheduled for shut-down.

Many suspect that more than animal research went on at Plum Island. Germ warfare and biological secrets are the most popular theories for what else may have been developed in the island's laboratory. It is suspected that such research was conducted in the 1950s.

In Eltman's article, John van Courtland Moon said his research on Plum Island shows the germ warfare claims are correct. Moon is an author and history professor emeritus at Massachusetts' Fitchburg State College. Unfortunately, Moon stated, Plum Island's research history "is not available in the public record".

Eltman and Salazar report an enthusiastic future scenario for the island exists in the mind of top real estate broker Gary DePersia, an agent working in the Hamptons area on Long Island's south fork. DePersia envisions the island as a resort, complete with golf course. A "major destination resort on eastern Long Island" would be a plus, DePersia indicated.

Executive director of the Citizens Campaign for the Environment Adrienne Esposito has a different view. She said it is not possible to know what may have been the environmental norm on the island in the past. Usage of the island acreage is not publicly chronicled and "mishaps or illegal dumping or the unreported disposal of materials" is unknown, Esposito pointed out.

Foot-and-mouth disease, known to be a bovine-carried pathogen, as well as other animal health issues have been studied on Plum Island, an 840-acre land tract. Pathogens that could cause human illness and death have also been kept in tight security in the island's laboratory, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, Eltman and Salazar reported.

The article written by Eltman said the GAO gave a security report to Congress in 2007, prompted by the terrorist attack on New York City's World Trade Center in 2001 and resurgent concerns surrounding the global use of bioterrorism. After the report was reviewed by Congress, Plum Island's operations were transferred from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to the Department of Homeland Security.

Esposito said in Eltman's article, "Any time a government facility is cloaked in secrecy, you have to wonder about what went on (there)". A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, Amy Kudwa, said the island's operations are protected by security cameras, patrols, and checkpoints, as well as fences, radar and locks.

Currently, hearings have been held to decide the island's fate after its laboratory facilities are moved to a targeted area in Kansas. Plum Island has long been a subject of secrecy, dating back to the beginning of the Cold War, when access to its animal disease laboratory was established as limited to only scientists and support personnel and a few approved guests.

Author Nelson DeMille's 1997 thriller, Plum Island, colored the island and laboratory location as a site of mysterious scientific and biological murder and intrigue.

A closed Army base and a lighthouse and usable beach also exist on the tiny island. A nature preserve, federal park, and renovating the old lab into a visitor's center are possibilities being looked at in the evaluation for Plum Island's future.

Moving the lab to Kansas, however, is not being met with approval by all concerned. Eltman and Salazar's report said U.S. Representative Timothy Bishop claimed the $50 to $80 million that may be earned from the sale of Plum Island wouldn't be enough to construct a new animal disease research center in Kansas. That cost could reach $650 million. The possible sale figures don't include environmental cleanup costs.

Bishop's district includes Plum Island. He sees a decommissioning of the island as a "Pandora's Box", and says the millions needed to open a new facility in Kansas as pouring "hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars down a sinkhole".

In 2009, Congress passed an appropriations bill of $32 million to build a new 520,000-square-foot lab in Kansas. It would house a National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility. The tagged cost is mainly for planning and design of the new building. Diseases passed from animals to humans would be part of the research done in the new location.

Although moving the lab to Kansas seems inevitable, some still question the wisdom of that location. A veterinarian who worked on Plum Island as the laboratory director from 2000 to 2003 was quoted in Eltman's article concerning anthrax studies done at the facility. Anthrax "could be used as a weapon to target the livestock industry," the vet, Retired Colonel David Huxsoll, said.

An outbreak of anthrax-generated disease, or hoof-and-mouth disease, or other contagions in the Kansas "Beef Belt" could have far-ranging effects on the country's food management chain and economy.

It "would be disastrous," Huxsoll said in response to what a cattle country disease outbreak could mean.