U.S. FDA said approves cloned meat and milk
Pastor Dale Morgan
U.S. FDA said approves cloned meat and milk*
Reuters
WASHINGTON - A U.S. Food and Drug Administration report finds that meat
and milk from cloned animals is, for the most part, safe to eat, the
Washington Post reported on Tuesday.
The newspaper said it had obtained a copy of a long-awaited, 968-page
"final risk assessment," from the agency ahead of release.
It said FDA experts measured vitamins A, C, B1, B2, B6 and B12 as well
as niacin, pantothenic acid, calcium, iron, phosphorous, zinc, fatty
acids, cholesterol, fat, protein, amino acids and lactose in meat and
milk from 600 cloned animals, including cattle and pigs.
Levels all looked normal.
The agency also found no health effects in animals fed meat and milk
from cloned animals for more than three months.
"Food from cattle, swine, and goat clones is as safe to eat as that from
their more conventionally-bred counterparts," the newspaper quotes the
report as saying.
Last week, the European Food Safety Authority also approved the safety
of meat and milk from cloned animals.
FDA officials have said the report would likely be released later on
Tuesday.
The newspaper said the report concluded there was not enough information
to rule on the safety of food from cloned sheep. It also said that food
from newborn cloned cattle, which often are abnormal, "may pose some
very limited human food consumption risk."
"Moral, religious and ethical concerns ... have been raised," the
newspaper quotes the FDA as saying in a commentary.
But the agency decided to go with science alone.
Several companies and academic laboratories have cloned farm animals and
few experts predict herds of cloned animals will be providing commercial
meat and milk -- mostly because the process is so expensive.
Instead, the goal is to clone prize animals and then breed them
conventionally to create herds.
The newspaper quoted Joseph Mendelson, legal director of the Center for
Food Safety, an advocacy group that petitioned FDA to restrict the sale
of food from clones, as saying his group was considering legal action.
"One of the amazing things about this is that at a time when we have a
readily acknowledged crisis in our food safety system, the FDA is
spending its resources and energy and political capital on releasing a
safety assessment for something that no one but a handful of companies
wants," Mendelson told the newspaper.