Where are the wackos proclaiming the salmonella in tomatoes mess is a terrorist attack? Given the financial loss ineffective and under financed inspection of tomatoes cost, the following concerns are no surprise, especially when you remember the revelations last year about meat inspection cutbacks.

The government acknowledged that an outbreak of one of the most contagious animal diseases from any of five locations being considered for a new high-security laboratory – an event it considered highly unlikely – would be more devastating to the U.S. economy than an outbreak from the isolated island lab where such research is now conducted.

The 1,005-page Homeland Security Department study, released Friday, calculated that economic losses in an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease could surpass $4 billion if the lab were built near livestock herds in Kansas or Texas, two options the Bush administration is considering. That would be roughly $1 billion higher than the government’s estimate of losses blamed on a hypothetical outbreak from its existing laboratory on Plum Island, N.Y.

The administration is studying the safest place to move its research on such dangerous pathogens from Plum Island to the U.S. mainland near herds of livestock, raising concerns about a catastrophic outbreak. A final choice is expected by late fall.

A simulated outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease – part of an earlier U.S. government exercise called “Crimson Sky” – ended with fictional riots in the streets after the simulation’s National Guardsmen were ordered to kill tens of millions of farm animals, so many that troops ran out of bullets. In the exercise, the government said it would have been forced to dig a ditch in Kansas 25 miles long to bury carcasses.