Date:
01/15/2008 05:16 PM. FDA says cloned animals are safe for food, sales won't
begin quite yet
By LAURAN NEERGAARD
AP Medical Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) _ Just over a decade after
scientists cloned the first animal, the last major barrier
to selling meat and milk from clones has fallen: The U.S.
government declared this food safe Tuesday.
Now, will people buy it?
Consumer anxiety about cloning is serious
enough that several major food companies, including the big
dairy producer Dean Foods Co. and Smithfield Foods Inc., say
they aren't planning to sell products from cloned animals.
And the industry says most Americans would
never eat a cloned animal for sheer economic reasons: At $10,000
to $20,000 per cloned cow — compared with $1,000 for
an ordinary steer — they're too valuable. They would
be used primarily for breeding, to produce a steady supply
of cattle that are particularly tender, for instance, or for
prize dairy cows. It would be offspring of clones that consumers
would eat.
But it will be hard to tell which foods do
contain ingredients originating from cloned animals. The Food
and Drug Administration ruled that labels won't have to reveal
whether the food comes from cloned cows, pigs or goats, or
the clones' offspring, because those ingredients are no different
than meat or milk from livestock bred the old-fashioned way.
"We found nothing in the food that could
potentially be hazardous. The food in every respect is indistinguishable
from food from any other animal," FDA food safety chief
Dr. Stephen Sundlof said. "It is beyond our imagination
to even find a theory that would cause the food to be unsafe."
Still, the government asked producers to continue
a voluntary moratorium on sales of meat or milk from clones
for a little longer, for marketing reasons. The Agriculture
Department said it needed a transition period to get the safety
findings to foreign trade partners and food companies.
"This is about market acceptance,"
USDA Undersecretary Bruce Knight said, adding that he expected
this period to last months.
The two main U.S. cloning companies, Viagen
Inc. and Trans Ova Genetics, already have produced more than
600 cloned animals for U.S. breeders, including copies of
prize-winning cows and rodeo bulls. They agreed to USDA's
call for a continued moratorium Tuesday, but stressed that
it applied only to clones themselves, not those animals' conventionally
produced offspring, which can begin selling immediately.
The FDA spent six years tracking the safety
of cloning, and its decision was long expected, but it came
after an emotional fight by opponents. Congress passed legislation
last month urging further study of the issue, a call echoed
by consumer advocates who also asked that foods from cloned
animals be labeled as such.
Their objections aren't just about food safety
but also include animal welfare since many attempts at livestock
cloning still end in fatal birth defects.
"If you have moral objections to a particular
food, or ethical objections to them, FDA's saying, 'Tough,
you've got to eat it,'" said Carol Tucker-Foreman of
the Consumer Federation of America, who pledged to push for
more food producers to shun clone-derived ingredients.
"The FDA did not give adequate consideration
to the welfare of these animals or their surrogate mothers,"
said Wayne Pacelle of the Humane Society of the United States.
This was a day forecast since Scottish scientists
in 1997 introduced the world to Dolly the sheep, the first
successfully cloned animal. Ironically, sheep aren't on the
list of FDA's approved cloned animals; the agency said there
wasn't as much data about their safety as about cows, pigs
and goats.
The FDA isn't alone in calling cloned food
safe. European regulators last week issued a draft report
reaching the same conclusion, and the U.S. National Academy
of Sciences has found no cause for concern.
By its very definition, a successfully cloned
animal should be no different from the original animal whose
DNA was used to create it.
Still, FDA isn't surprised by the outcry since
it pored over 30,500 comments from the public — many
of them negative — before issuing Tuesday's ruling.
A September 2006 poll by the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology
found that 64 percent of Americans were uncomfortable with
animal cloning. And when FDA convened its own focus groups,
it found a third of consumers would never eat food from cloned
animals, while another third weren't worried and the rest
fell somewhere in the middle.
The public should understand that cloning
is just another form of breeding, like the artificial insemination
that ranchers widely use, Trans Ova President David Faber
said.
"Our farmer and rancher clients are pleased,
because it provided them with another reproductive tool,"
he said, pledging to "be a good steward of the technology."
But cloning technology isn't perfected. Aside
from birth defects, Dolly was euthanized in 2003, well short
of her normal lifespan, because of a lung disease that raised
questions about how cloned animals will age.
The FDA's report acknowledges that, "Currently,
it is not possible to draw any conclusions regarding the longevity
of livestock clones or possible long-term health consequences"
for the animal.
But the agency concluded that cloned animals
that are born healthy are no different than their non-cloned
counterparts during their prime food-producing years, and
go on to reproduce normally as well. Moreover, it is working
with a group of international scientists that will issue guidelines
later this year on how to clone, to minimize risk to the animals.
