SENTIENT TIMES Feb/March 2001

America's Food Safety Crisis Intensifies
By Ronnie Cummins

She is an independent thinker of sound judgment and vast experience. She knows the science, the politics, and she knows how to make a sound decision on complicated and difficult issues. We are delighted with her selection, it is hard to imagine a better choice.
The Biotechnology industry commenting on the nomination of former agbiotech executive Ann Veneman as George Bush's Secretary of Agriculture Corporate agribusiness and the biotech industry had a bad year in 2000. After promising Wall Street that genetic engineering and American-style factory farming were about to conquer the world and that free trade, monopoly patents on living organisms, and the enforcement powers of the World Trade Organization were going to whip consumers and the world's 2.4 billion farmers and rural villagers into line, Year One of the Biotech Century turned out to be something of a disaster. Behind the bravado of public relations and the reassurances of government bureaucrats, the food industry and the Gene Giants are in serious disarray. For the first time in five years the amount of global acreage devoted to biotech crops has leveled off and appears headed in 2001 for significant decreases.

Longstanding industrial agriculture practices such as feeding antibiotics and rendered animal protein to animals are being banned in Europe and are generating controversy even in the US. The second wave of the Mad Cow crisis is sweeping across Europe, prompting a massive decline in beef sales—with recent revelations suggesting that North America may be heading for a similar crisis of its own.

FDA Says No Labeling, No Safety-Testing Required
On Jan. 17, the Food and Drug Administration issued its long-awaited proposed federal regulations on genetically engineered foods and crops. As anticipated the FDA refused to call for mandatory labeling or mandatory safety-testing—despite numerous polls showing 80-95% of Americans want labeling and safety-testing and the fact that scientists who are not affiliated with the biotech industry feel strongly that unless rigorous, independent, pre-market safety testing can demonstrate that GE foods and crops are safe, these products must not be allowed. There will now be a 75-day period for the public to comment on the FDA rules, and to demand a moratorium. Check our websites soon (www.organicconsumers.org or www.gefoodalert.org) for guidelines on how to send a letter or fax to the FDA on this issue.

Over the past few months, things have gone from bad to worse for the agbiotech lobby. Among recent developments are the following:

  • Two potentially massive class-action lawsuits were filed in December in Illinois and Iowa by farmers against Aventis, the manufacturer of StarLink seeds. According to the plaintiffs in Iowa, they suffered severe financial losses after "Japan cut its US corn purchases by more than 50% and South Korea, the second largest U.S. corn export market, banned the importation of U.S. corn altogether.'' In late-December, Reuters reported that Missouri Attorney General Jay Nixon demanded that Aventis post a $25 million bond "to ensure the company had sufficient funds to compensate farmers and grain handlers hit financially by StarLink."

    Last October a group of consumers filed a lawsuit in Chicago, alleging they were poisoned by StarLink-tainted Kraft Taco Bell shells, and 44 people filed complaints with the FDA claiming StarLink products caused them to suffer rashes, diarrhea, vomiting, itching and life-threatening anaphylactic shock. On November 28, the EPA heard from a Scientific Advisory Panel that StarLink may be already setting off food allergies. For the full testimony of Dr. Michael Hansen from the Consumers Union on StarLink and Bt corn allergenicity see www.purefood.org/ge/hansenstarlink.cfm

  • The safety of genetically engineered foods came into question in Decemebr when the prestigious journal Science published an article by two fellows from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The article, by Dr. LaReesa Wolfenbarger and Dr. Paul Phifer, emphasized that there has been almost no peer-reviewed scientific research published which shows that GE crops are safe for the environment. In their study, Wolfenbarger and Phifer state that researching environmental risks is likely to be complicated, with risks varying over time among crops, among strains of a single crop, and between environments. Some risks, they say, may be all but impossible to assess.

    In a related story, Dr. Arpad Pusztai, the UK's most well-know critic of biotech, after surveying the world scientific literature on animal feeding studies, found a grand total of only four peer-reviewed articles on genetically engineered foods, despite Monsanto and industry claims that scores of scientific papers have proven their safety. Pusztai's own safety studies in the late 1990s, conducted at the Rowett Institute in Scotland, caused a major stir in Europe, when lab rats fed genetically engineered potatoes spliced with lectin suffered serious damage to their vital organs.

  • An Expert Panel of the International Cotton Advisory Committee reported in November that in two provinces of China, cotton boll worms, a major pest, are developing resistance to genetically engineered cotton plants spliced with Bt. Critics of Bt crops have warned for years that "super pests" will inevitably develop, threatening the livelihood of organic or low-chemical input farmers who use non-genetically engineered Bt sprays as an emergency pest control tool on cotton, corn, and other crops. Meanwhile Bt-resistant pests have been reported in Australia and perhaps at a "threateningly high level" according to scientific experts.

  • Barbara Keeler and Marc Lappe reported in a potentially explosive story in the Los Angeles Times on Jan. 7 that the FDA apparently ignored troubling data which Monsanto published in the Journal of Nutrition in March 1996—data which strongly suggests that Roundup Ready soybeans, the world's most widely cultivated genetically engineered crop, may set off food allergies in humans. According to the authors, data in Monsanto's study "shows that, relative to conventional soy meal, raw Roundup Ready soy meal contained 27% more trypsin inhibitor, a potential allergen that interferes with protein digestion and has been associated with enlarged cells in rat pancreases." According to Keeler and Lappe "This important measurement was camouflaged in a table on unrelated information." After toasting the GE soy meal several times, the levels of another allergen, called lectin, were nearly double those in conventional soybeans.

    Scientists have warned for years that conventional soybeans contain low levels of 14 proteins that can potentially set off food allergies in humans and that genetically engineering soybeans could possibly cause the level of one or more of these 14 proteins to significantly increase. However, hiding behind the doctrine of "substantial equivalence," the FDA did not require Monsanto to submit comprehensive data on herbicide resistant Roundup Ready soybeans before they were brought on the market. In effect this means that RR soybeans may already be setting off food allergies among large numbers of people, given that 54% of America's soybean crop is genetically engineered, while 60% of all processed foods contain soy or soy derivatives. In 1999 the York Nutritional Lab in the UK, commenting on a mysterious 50% rise in soy allergies among British consumers, attributed the increase in food allergies to the fact that consumers the previous year had begun ingesting large amount of imported GE soybeans.

  • On Nov. 11, speaking to a massive crowd at the Vatican, Pope John Paul II urged extreme caution concerning genetically engineered food, stating that the use of biotechnology in agriculture, "cannot be evaluated only on the basis of immediate economic interests. It is necessary to subject it in advance to rigorous scientific and ethical checking to prevent it ending up in disaster for … the future of the earth." On Nov. 14, the Commission on Social Action of Reform Judaism passed a resolution on labeling of genetically engineered food. The Commission called on the government to "monitor the health, ecological and religious liberty implications of genetic engineering." Among Protestant denominations the United Methodist Church recently called for mandatory labeling of all GE foods, with pre-market safety testing required. According to Jaydee Hansen of the UMC, "We call for policies that encourage the gradual transition to sustainable and organic agriculture."

Factory Farm Practices Threaten Public Health
The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) released an important study in Washington, DC by Charles Benbrook and Margaret Mellon showing that 70% of all antibiotic drugs in the US are being fed to farm animals as growth promoters or production aids. The study, which generated significant headlines and TV coverage across the nation, points out that 25 million pounds of valuable antibiotics—roughly 70 percent of total US antibiotic production—are fed to chickens, pigs, and cows every year for non-therapeutic purposes like growth promotion. The drug-dependent US meat industry has tried to downplay its massive use of antibiotics—a practice which is now starting to be banned in Europe—claiming that it was using "only" 18 million pounds a year of antibiotics in animal feed each year. Recent research has shown that the overuse of medical prescriptions and the routine agribusiness practice of adding antibiotics to animal feed are giving rise to virulent antibiotic-resistant strains of disease—such as salmonella, campylobacter, pneumonia, meningitis, and ear and blood infections—in millions of Americans every year, According to statistics released by the Centers for Disease Control several years ago approximately 6% of all hospital infections are now showing signs of antibiotic resistance. The figure today is probably closer to 10%.

"The excessive use of antibiotics by the livestock industry is sobering," said Dr. Charles Benbrook, an independent economist and co-author of the report. "Feeding antibiotics to animals from birth to slaughter may modestly improve meat industry profits, but it puts everyone's health at risk. It is time to rethink how pigs, cattle and poultry are raised in the United States."

The Factory Farm lobby counterattacked with a series of op-ed pieces and editorials of its own, claiming that the UCS were exaggerating the problem and that European-type measures to ban the feeding of antibiotics to animals would cause unnecessary economic hardships to modern agribusiness. Meanwhile sales of organic meat, eggs, and dairy products, which ban the use of antibiotics, are booming, not only across the US, but in the entire industrialized world. A full copy of the UCS report can be found at www.ucsusa.org.

Mad Cow Disease: Will the Nightmare Spread to the US?
Mad Cow panic has once again swept across the European continent, provoking drastic declines in beef sales, economic insecurity among farmers, trepidation in the meat, drug, cosmetic, and plasma industry, and near-hysteria among consumers. Recent revelations of cattle testing positive for Mad Cow disease (also known as Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy or BSE) in Germany, France, Spain, Netherlands, Switzerland, Denmark, Ireland, Portugal, and Italy, and the reports that thousands of tons of BSE-infected cattle feed were exported from Britain to other nations over the past decade, have set off the largest food scare in history.

Although only 92 Europeans have thus far officially died since 1996 from new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), the human equivalent of Mad Cow, British scientists admitted last year that, due to the long latency period of the disease (up to 30-40 years in humans), and due to the fact that the majority of meat eaters have probably been exposed to Mad Cow, several hundred thousand Britons (and an indeterminate number of Europeans from other countries) and perhaps many more may die from the incurable brain-wasting disease over the next few decades. Trying to keep the situation under control, German officials have proposed mandatory testing for all cattle over 24 months old for BSE, while EU authorities have placed a complete ban on the feeding of animal parts (in industry terminology, rendered animal protein) back to animals, a controversial practice still routine in US agriculture.

The Mad Cow crisis in Europe has been a significant factor contributing to opposition to genetically engineered foods. Seeing how industry and government scientists have systematically lied to them about the dangers of feeding animals to animals has made many consumers lose faith in industrial agriculture altogether. Noting that the same government officials who have repeatedly tried to reassure them that the BSE crisis in under control are now saying that genetically engineered foods are safe has brought on a profound skepticism and anger at the grassroots level. Now a similar crisis of confidence may start to develop in the United States as well.

Sandra Blakeslee of the New York Times reported on Jan. 11 that the US Food and Drug Administration's supposed 1997 ban on feeding rendered animal protein to cows and other ruminant animals is full of loopholes, and moreover that the so-called ban is not being enforced among the thousands of companies involved in the $3.2 billion dollar rendering industry and the $20 billion dollar animal feed industry. As Blakeslee wrote: "Among 180 large companies that render cattle and another ruminant, sheep, nearly a quarter were not properly labeling their products and did not have a system to prevent commingling, the FDA said. And among 347 FDA-licensed feed mills that handle ruminant materials—these tend to be large operators that mix drugs into their products—20 percent were not using labels with the required caution statement, and 25 percent did not have a system to prevent commingling."

In other words millions of US cows, sheep, game farm deer and elk, and pigs (pigs and cow's blood were inexplicably exempted in the so-called FDA feed ban of 1997), not to mention household pets, are still being fed billions of pounds of animal feed or pet food containing meat and offal from ruminant animals—despite the obvious danger to human and animal health and despite the fact that the FDA and the USDA for the past three years have been reassuring the public that this was no longer happening.

But the story gets scarier. In the Times on the front page of the Sunday Jan. 14 edition (tucked under a misleading headline "Stringent Steps Taken by US on Cow Illness") Blakeslee drops the bombshell. Not only has the US Mad Cow feed ban been a joke, but apparently US feed companies, pet food companies, pharmaceutical firms, and nutritional supplement manufacturers have been carrying on with business as usual by importing large quantities of possibly contaminated bovine parts and rendered animal protein. It appears that the US industry has greedily imported tons of likely contaminated rendered animal protein from Britain since 1989. After British authorities made it illegal to feed rendered animal protein to ruminant animals in their own country, the UK feed industry simply sold it overseas..

There is mounting evidence that US rendered animal protein and bovine, sheep, deer, and elk parts are themselves likely carriers of BSE and other Mad Cow-like diseases. As Blakeslee relates, scientists have generally agreed that BSE or BSE-like diseases "spontaneously" appear in "one out of every million humans, cows, sheep and many other mammals. "Since 36 million cattle are slaughtered annually in the United States, about 36 cows spontaneously infected with mad cow disease could be entering the nation's food chain each year." Thirty-six domestic US Mad Cows a year being ground up and fed back to other animals may not sound that alarming until you consider the fact that an average cow, pig, chicken, game farm deer, elk, fish farm fish, or household cat and dog—because of the commingling of many different animals' body parts at the rendering plant and the feed mill—will be consuming the body parts of literally thousands of different animals in their feed over their lifetime.

And the story gets worse. Scrapie (Mad Sheep Disease) has been endemic in US sheep herds since 1947, and the government has done little or nothing to eradicate it. Significant numbers of scrapie-infected sheep have undoubtedly been ground up every year and fed back to other animals. In addition the US currently has a raging epidemic of Mad Deer Disease and Mad Elk Disease (technically called Chronic Wasting Disease) in parts of Colorado and Wyoming. There are already several documented cases of young deer hunters in their 20s and 30s dying from CJD, the human equivalent of Mad Cow.

The Times reports that up to 18% of mule-tail deer in the Fort Collins area of Colorado are now carriers of Chronic Wasting Disease. Hunters that kill deer in Colorado are required to turn in the heads of these animals so that they can be tested for CWD or Mad Deer Disease. Officials tell hunters not to eat the meat of infected animals (lab tests can take as long as six weeks) but have refused to ban hunting or eating venison.

The FDA warned US drug companies, cosmetic companies, and nutritional supplements firms on Dec. 6 to stop using European bovine parts in most of their products as of Jan. 1. It may already be too late. As Blakeslee points out, even this ban—assuming it actually gets enforced—still has loopholes. As she writes, nutritional supplements "must have labels listing ingredients like bovine pituitaries and adrenals, but manufacturers are not required to list the country of origin. Other beef byproducts that are still allowed in the country include milk, blood, fat, gelatin, tallow, bone mineral extracts, collagen, semen, amniotic fluid, serum albumin and other parts of European cattle that are widely used in vaccines and medicines." Several million people in the US and overseas are taking "glandular supplements" or body-building hormones which contain concentrated brain and pituitary material from US, British, and European cows.

Mad Cow Disease and the growing global opposition to factory farming and genetic engineering may turn out to the harbingers of a new era of sustainable living and organic agriculture. One can only hope that we make the necessary transition to organic farming and ban the most dangerous practices of genetic engineering and industrial food production before it is too late. It is up to all of us to do our part in "voting" with our grocery dollars and communicating with our representatives, the FDA and other federal agencies whenever possible.

From BioDemocracy News #31 (Jan. 2001), a publication of the Organic Consumers Association, 6101 Cliff Estate Road Little Marais, MN 55614; www.purefood.org; www.organicconsumers.org.

The FDA has announced an official citizen comment period until April 3, 2001. Write to FDA Commissioner Jane Henney and tell her that the new policy is unacceptable. Tell her you are disappointed that the FDA continues to ignore the safety concerns of consumers and chooses instead to help the companies developing biotech products. Demand that she change the policy on genetically engineered food to one that protects the rights of the consumer. A sample letter follows.

Send Email to fdadockets@oc.fda.gov, subject re: Dockets 00N-1396 and 00D-1598 OR write to: FDA Dockets Management Branch (HFA 305) Food and Drug Administration 5630 Fisher's Lane, rm. 1061 Rockville MD 20852 (include docket #'s in letters as well).

Sample Letter

Dear Commissioner,

The proposed Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations fail to require labels or safety tests on genetically engineered (GE) food. The new rules continue to deny Americans the right to know what is in our food, while protecting the economic interests of biotech corporations. Labeling GE foods would protect the public from potential health effects that could only be traced if GE foods can be identified. By refusing to require both labeling and mandatory safety testing of foods, the FDA puts consumer's health at risk, and ignores the recommendations of the Biotechnology Consultative Forum, who in December urged the US to require mandatory labeling of GE foods.

I urge you to reconsider this proposal and insure that GE foods are subject to pre-market testing and labeling. Americans have a right to make informed decisions about the food we consume.

To tell the FDA how you feel about the need for Regulation on the Use of Antibiotics in Livestock send letters to: Dockets Management Branch, 5630 Fishers Lane, Rm. 1061, HFA-305, Rockville, MD 20852; or via e-mail to fdadockets@oc.fda.gov.

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