Raw, medium, well done, or cloned?
(February 1st 2008) Start the day with a bowl of cereal soaked in cloned cow's milk then dine upon a cloned cow's steak. This could soon become reality in the USA, following the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA's) decision to allow the sale of cloned animal products. However, reports Melanie Estrella, Europe remains sceptical.
Although in the near future, the shelves of American supermarkets are to be stocked with food made from the offspring of cloned animals, the European Commission is forming its own views on the safety of cloned cows, pigs and goats.
The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), assigned by the European Commission in February 2007 to investigate the safety of livestock cloning, recently presented its preliminary findings. In the 47 page report, it concluded that products from healthy cloned animals and their offspring are "very unlikely" to pose risks to consumers.
The FDA came to the same conclusion in their rather longer, 1000 page, report. For six years, FDA scientists analyzed the behaviour, organ function, blood, meat and milk of cloned animals and their immediate offspring. Since no differences to normally conceived animals could be detected, they judged cloning to be a breeding technique representing no greater risks to the consumer than other, conventionally applied breeding methods, such as in vitro fertilization, artificial insemination, or embryo transfer.
However, in addition to the FDA's scientific risk assessment, the European survey included an ethical evaluation of the use of cloned animals for agricultural reasons. Conducted by the European Group of Ethics in Science and New Technologies, it concluded that cloning farm animals for food generation is unacceptable because many cloned creatures suffer increased morbidity and mortality. To date, the generation of a single healthy cloned animal necessitates the creation of 10 to 40 sick or dying ones.
Some 600 cloned animals live in the USA today, most of them cows.
Cloning is an expensive option: American farmers have to invest upto 20,000 Dollars to conserve a precious copy of their barn star using laboratory procedures that transfer nuclear DNA from selected animals into enucleated oocytes for subsequent implantation into surrogate mothers. Which is why cloning is currently used for breeding rather than direct production of steaks and milk. Instead it is the offspring of the cloned animals that is going to enter the commercial food chain, ending up in the consumer's shopping bag and dishes.
Yet, consumer requests to specifically label these cloned food products have been hampered because, unlike for genetically modified organisms, there is as yet no test that can unambiguously identify products from clones or their offspring.
The decision on whether to allow the sale of cloned animal products in the European Union will finally be decided in Brussels in May 2008.
People feeling uneasy at the prospect of finding cloned meat and dairy products on their dishes can take solace by buying organic food, whose farmers and growers will continue to produce their goods using traditional methods.
