MANHATTAN — In an effort to mitigate the economic impact of a foreign animal disease event, officials with the Kansas Department of Agriculture are leading an annual preparedness event at the Manhattan headquarters.
This year’s mock scenario involves the introduction of foot-and-mouth disease in the United States. KDA Emergency Management Coordinator David Hogg says the department has several state agencies, federal and local government, industry and university officials participating in the four-day exercise.
Those agencies then coordinate a planned multi-level response to help mitigate the economic impact of such an incident. Hogg says if such an incident actually occurred it would potentially be catastrophic.
The exercise features a multitude of entities coming together to identify how best to manage the response to limit the economic impact of such an event, which would affect cloven-hooved animals like cattle, sheep and swine and devastate the markets. Information gathered from this week’s exercise will be shared with 16 other states that are also observing.
The KDA building in Manhattan this week acts as the Incident Command Post. KDA Communications Director Heather Lansdowne says drawing from the number of agricultural entities in the region, especially Kansas State University is a major benefit for these exercises.
More than 200 individuals are participating in the exercise which is partially funded by a U.S. Department of Homeland Security grant. Foot-and-mouth disease was last identified in the U.S. in 1929. It is not a human food safety concern nor a public health threat. The four-day exercise concludes Thursday.
