Research on Non-Endemic Animal Diseases

For the past 50 years, the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, located on Plum Island off the tip of Long Island, N.Y., has been the nation’s main research facility for studying animal diseases that threaten the U.S. livestock industry. In 2003, the Plum Island laboratory, formerly administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, was transferred to the Department of Homeland Security. In coming years, Plum Island will be replaced by a new, state-of-the-art research laboratory called the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF), which is to be constructed in Manhattan, Kansas. Whereas Plum Island operates laboratories at the Biosafety Level 3 and below, NBAF will have a maximum-containment (BSL-4) lab for the study of highly dangerous infectious diseases affecting both large livestock and humans. FMD, the most potentially economically devastating animal disease, does not typically infect humans.¹⁷