Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Where's the Beef Beef Beef? There, There, There - FDA OKs Cloning
The FDA, in a display of infinitesimal wisdom, has decided that using cloned animals for meat and milk is fine, not a problem, don't worry about a thing. And, of course, they speak after exhaustive testing over a sufficiently long period of time to follow any short- or long-term effects. As the Washington Post puts it:
How about this: until you can do widespread tests and see what the results are of people ingesting clones, you simply cannot state that there is no problem. When issues occur in any type of health study, they can occur so infrequently that it takes large numbers to notice them. I'm not arguing that meat and milk from cloned animals is going to have a problem. I can't know that and wouldn't want to pretend that I did. However, I know enough not to make dangerous assumptions of safety without equally valid information.
There won't be any requirement to label meat from cloned animals as such, though the FDA may allow labeling that food comes from non-cloned animals. But how far does the mark of Clone go back? Do an animal's immediate parents cause concern? Next generation back? How would anyone even track this? But the approach the FDA has taken can't take this into consideration:
A long-awaited final report from the Food and Drug Administration concludes that foods from healthy cloned animals and their offspring are as safe as those from ordinary animals, effectively removing the last U.S. regulatory barrier to the marketing of meat and milk from cloned cattle, pigs and goats.The nearly thousand-page government report acknowledges ethical, moral, and religious issues, but says that it is not allowed to consider those.
How about this: until you can do widespread tests and see what the results are of people ingesting clones, you simply cannot state that there is no problem. When issues occur in any type of health study, they can occur so infrequently that it takes large numbers to notice them. I'm not arguing that meat and milk from cloned animals is going to have a problem. I can't know that and wouldn't want to pretend that I did. However, I know enough not to make dangerous assumptions of safety without equally valid information.
To create its final risk assessment, the FDA gathered data on nearly all of the more than 600 U.S. farm-animal clones produced and hundreds of their offspring, as well as many from overseas. But it faced challenges in the process.But permission comes down anyway. It's not as though the world is in danger of starvation through lack of livestock. What the clones are supposed to be is breeding stock, to get only the results companies think they want. But has anyone studied the potential issues of reducing biodiversity? Silly me, of course not - it's unimportant, because, hell, we're already creating genetically modified crops that are displacing traditional varieties. And those are fine, because government has already ruled that they are. So we see arguments for permitting a practice being predicated on permitting the practice, a logical merry-go-round. And who cares whether large markets for US agriculture won't buy genetically modified crops and might well refuse to buy meat and milk from animals bred from clones?
Those animals were made by scientists scattered among various universities and companies using different methods that in many cases were difficult to compare.
Moreover, many of those animals were not just clones but also had genes added to them for projects unrelated to food production.
There won't be any requirement to label meat from cloned animals as such, though the FDA may allow labeling that food comes from non-cloned animals. But how far does the mark of Clone go back? Do an animal's immediate parents cause concern? Next generation back? How would anyone even track this? But the approach the FDA has taken can't take this into consideration:
In the end, facing the reality that epigenetics have never been a factor in assessing the wholesomeness of food, agency scientists decided to use the same simple but effective standard used by farmers since the dawn of agriculture: If a farm animal appears in all respects to be healthy, then presume that food from that animal is safe to eat.What insanity. "Looks fine to me" becomes the food standard, at a time when our food production has become contaminated multiple times from agents and issues we already understand. Just when I think the shortsightedness of government couldn't get any worse, I find new depths of disgust with groups that want to direct nature and that don't want to take a responsible path. Proving a negative - lack of harm - is certainly a difficult, and perhaps ultimately impossible, task. But there's the old saying that the difficult we do immediately; the impossible takes a little longer. When you weight financial and corporate convenience with the health of billions, take a little longer.
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Scientists also looked at nutrient levels in meat and milk from a few dozen cattle and pig clones and hundreds of their progeny, and compared them with values from conventional animals. They measured vitamins A, C, B1, B2, B6 and B12 as well as niacin, pantothenic acid, calcium, iron, phosphorous, zinc, 12 kinds of fatty acids, cholesterol, fat, protein, amino acids and carbohydrates including lactose.
