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Clone Burgers: FDA Sees No Safety Concerns, but Findings Raise a Chorus of Objections

Posted on: Wednesday, 31 January 2007, 00:00 CST

By Josh Fischman

You can't tell the difference -- even under a microscope -- between meat from a cloned cow and meat from a conventional animal, say U.S. government scientists. In December, their conclusion cleared the way for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to allow meat and milk from clones onto supermarket shelves.

And since there's no discernable difference, the agency says, there's probably no need to mark the food with any special label.

"The meat and milk from clones are as safe as the meat and milk that we eat every day," says Stephen Sundlof, director of the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine. "Their offspring are also safe."

His agency, which had previously asked cattle and dairy farmers to keep cloned animals out of the food supply, have released a draft policy that will allow them in. "We'll get public comments on the policy until April 2, 2007," Sundlof says. "Then the ruling could be finalized by the end of the year."

But news of a likely cloning approval has prompted a chorus of "Whoa!" from food safety groups, consumers in public opinion polls, and even the U.S. Senate. "It's a complete rush to judgment," says Joseph Mendelson, legal director of the Center for Food Safety, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group based in Washington, D.C. "They're acting on very limited data."

And Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, joined by six Senate colleagues in December in a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt, warned that "selling milk from cloned cows will result in a 15 percent drop in purchases of U.S. dairy products" because people are so uncomfortable with the idea. Indeed, a December poll from the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology showed that 43 percent of Americans believed food from clones was unsafe.

There's no reason for any safety concern, nor are the data limited, say the two scientists behind the FDA review, Larisa Rudenko and John Matheson, both of whom work for the agency.

In a paper in the January 2007 issue of the journal Theriogenology, the two evaluated 13 separate reports that analyzed meat and milk from clones. They found that, in terms of nutritional and potentially toxic compounds, these products were, well, virtual clones of conventional animals. There was no real difference.

Another study by French researchers, published in the same issue, compared the meat from cloned and noncloned cows raised under the same conditions over a three-year period. Again, there was no difference in nutrition, no harm seen in rats that were fed the cloned products, and the scientists concluded that "potential risks associated with the consumption of meat and milk from clones are nil to very limited."

Matthew Wheeler, a specialist in animal reproduction techniques at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, was one of three outside experts asked by the FDA to review its conclusions. "I think the agency did a good job in evaluating the data," he says. "The bottom line is that cloning isn't all that different from other technologies we already use, like in vitro fertilization."

That method creates many pregnancies with sperm from a few bulls with highly desirable traits. "And these animals aren't different, either."

The FDA ruling has been in the works for at least four years, and during that time the agency has asked cattle and dairy farms with cloned animals to keep them out of the food supply. Farmers and ranchers have complied, in part because these animals are too expensive to turn into hamburger; it costs about $20,000 to clone a cow.

So observers expect that if anything ends up on supermarket shelves, it won't come directly from clones but from their offspring, who come into the world in a more or less natural way. Clones would be used to start lines of superior meat- and milk- producing animals. (Some clones could become burgers, though, after they've become old and can't breed anymore. Animals past their breeding prime are often candidates for the slaughterhouse.)

Those genetic lines are another worry for Mendelson. "If you create more genetic uniformity in a herd, you're also creating more susceptibility to diseases," he says. "We know that from history. So then you'll need more antibiotics and more hormones to keep the herd healthy, and those may carry their own risks."

Wheeler doesn't agree. "You won't get any more genetic uniformity than you do with current breeding techniques," he says, noting that perhaps 70 percent of today's dairy cows are produced using in vitro fertilization or other artificial methods. "Plus, we screen cows now for traces of antibiotics, and if we find them we don't use the animals. So there's already a system for keeping them out of the food supply."

He adds that market forces will keep farmers from raising sickly animals who need antibiotics and hormones: The cost of these substances will eat into their profits. It's much cheaper to raise healthy animals.

As for marking meat "cloned" or "clone-free," the FDA's Sundlof says the agency has made no decision yet. "But if our risk assessment isn't altered, it would be unlikely for us to require any special labeling," he says.

Source: Buffalo News

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