Is food from cloned animals safe to eat? The debate continues, but some of the meat and milk is already making its way into the marketplace in the U.S. - and possibly Canada.
by Alex Roslin
The Montreal
Saturday, September 06, 2008
Clones. To some, the word evokes Frankenfood or Star Wars
Stormtroopers. To veterinarian Donald Coover, it conjures a miraculous world of
super-cows with high milk and meat yields and horses as fast as Secretariat,
the legendary Triple Crown-winning thoroughbred.
Coover is helping to lead the clone revolution out of tiny Galesburg , Kansas
This is the home base of Coover's company SEK Genetics and
its thriving business of selling semen from elite cows to farmers. He says he
has also sold enough semen from cloned cows to inseminate tens of thousands of
farm animals, and he says "dozens at least, hundreds probably" of
other cloning businesses in the U.S. are
doing the same thing.
Despite a request by the U.S. Department of Agriculture
that farmers respect a voluntary moratorium on selling food from clones to
consumers, Coover says he has sold dozens of clones and their offspring to
farmers for use in food production since 2001.
"It's not illegal, and it's not unethical," he
said. "Instead of having just another damn horse, you have Secretariat
every time. That is why it's enormously useful." Cloning is a way to
create a perfect genetic copy of an adult animal. Its cell material is
transferred to an egg that is grown into an embryo and implanted in a surrogate
mother.
Advocates like Coover say the process can help farmers
duplicate top livestock and improve meat and milk yields.
"It's frustrating to me that we've been able to
develop this incredible technology, and people are bitching and moaning about
it," he said.
Food from clones is still banned in Canada ,
but Health Canada is
now considering whether to lift the ban.
Surveys show widespread public unease about the technology.
In a 2003 survey for the Canadian government, only 24 per cent of Canadians and
32 per cent of Americans supported the use of cloned animals for food.
The most common concern was "long-term risk to human
health," cited by 37 per cent of Canadians.
After a seven-year scientific review, the U.S. Food and
Drug Administration last January okayed meat and milk from cloned cows, pigs
and goats and their offspring as being safe to eat.
The selling of clone food to consumers is still on hold
while the U.S. Department of Agriculture works out a plan to assuage the
concerns of consumers in the U.S. and
abroad. In the interim, it has asked cloners and livestock farmers to continue
to respect its voluntary moratorium.
"The food in every respect is indistinguishable from
food from any other animal," FDA official Stephen Sundlof told reporters
last January.
But the scientific debate about clone food still appears
far from over. In fact, Sundlof's statement seems to be contradicted by a 2006
background paper on cloning prepared by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency
that was obtained through an access-to-information request.
The CFIA paper and the FDA's own 968-page scientific review
published last January depict cloning as an unpredictable technology fraught
with problems that almost always leads to outright failure or disfigured
animals that aren't safe to eat.
Even in cases where clones and their offspring look
healthy, they appear to suffer from genetic abnormalities and research is
sparse on whether their food is safe, the documents say.
"There is not enough data to indicate there will be no
problem," said Pascale Chavatte-Palmer, one of the world's leading cloning
researchers, whose studies are cited over 50 times in the FDA report.
"I think we should know more. We feel there is a rush
to accept those clones," she said in an interview.
In Europe ,
food from clones isn't being sold because of formal and informal moratoriums in
various countries. But this week, the European Parliament voted 622-to-32 to
urge the European Union's executive branch to ban food from clones, citing
concerns about food safety, consumer confidence and animal suffering.
The move followed a report from the European Food Safety
Authority in July that said, while there is "no clear evidence" food
from cloned cows and pigs is unsafe, more study is needed because of the lack
of data.
***
Chavatte-Palmer is no anti-biotech Luddite. She's dined on
what she calls "very good" cloned Kobe beef, which she
thinks was most likely safe to eat. Yet, she paints a picture of a technology
that's about as precise as a steamroller.
Out of 1,000 attempts, a clone embryo is successfully
developed and implanted into a surrogate mother only about 100 times, said
Chavatte-Palmer, who is a research leader at the French government's Institut
Nationale de la Recherche Agronomique, the leading agricultural-research
institute in Europe .
Of those 100 embryo transfers, just five fetuses are
typically born alive, she said.
The rest mostly miscarry due to genetic or physical defects
or abnormal placentas. Their most common abnormality is called large offspring
syndrome, which results in fetuses 20- to 85-per-cent larger than average.
The animals that survive to birth also often have large
offspring syndrome - which occurs in up to half of clone births - or other
severe problems like a deformed head, contracted tendons, extreme diarrhea,
diabetes, respiratory failure, heart disease and kidney problems. Many die
shortly after birth.
A Japanese study cited in the FDA's review painted an
unsettling picture of several clone calves that had died. "The neck was
bent backwards, the hind legs were stretched tightly or the second joints were
bent toward the opposite direction from the normal position," it said.
"Calf No. 12 was disemboweled at parturition and the
face of calf 16 was warped."
Some of the calves had been born with "an 'adult'
appearance" and displayed "many wrinkles in the skin, thick bone
structure and rough hairs resembling those of adult males."
Indeed, Dolly the sheep, the first mammal cloned from an
adult cell in 1996, lived for only six years, half the average lifespan for her
breed, and developed obesity, lung cancer and premature arthritis.
Even the few clones that appear to be healthy really
aren't, said Chavatte-Palmer, who is one of a small handful of scientists
worldwide to have studied the long-term health of clones.
"Cloned animals, although apparently normal, are
however significantly different from (conventionally raised animals) maintained
in the same conditions," she wrote in a paper in the journal Animal last
year.
The CFIA came to a similar conclusion in its paper.
"There is an inadequate amount of information on any species to determine
long-term physiological effects (of cloning)," it said.
"Early research suggests that these animals have
subtle gene expression abnormalities."
The CFIA said cloning "could have long-term effects
that compromise animal health and survival."
***
So is food from clones safe to eat? The FDA's review
concluded that meat and milk from deformed clones, which die early in life or
need to be euthanized, is unsafe.
But in a little-noticed passage deep in its report, the
agency okayed this food for entry into the human food chain if it is treated in
a meat-rendering plant.
Rendering plants process dead animals from zoos and
shelters, old meat from grocery stores and butcher-shop trimmings by chopping
them up, then cooking them at high temperatures.
Rendering leads to several products that enter the human
food chain directly and indirectly, including lard, tallow, protein for
livestock feed and crop fertilizer.
The FDA report cites no research on whether or not rendered
food from abnormal clones is safe.
"There is not a single study of that," said
Jaydee Hanson, a policy analyst at the Washington, D.C.-based Centre for Food
Safety.
Hanson said it can't be assumed the rendering process makes
all animal products safe to eat. "They don't let animals with mad cow
disease enter the food supply through rendering," he said. "They have
a belief this is safe. Belief is wonderful for a religious organization."
As for healthy-looking clones, the FDA says their food is
identical to that from other animals. "These products are not different
than food from traditionally bred animals," Bruce Knight, a senior U.S.
Department of Agriculture official, told reporters last January.
But the CFIA paper and the FDA's own review raise questions
about this conclusion as well.
"The use of (cloning) may have an effect on gene
expression in the resulting animals and thus alter food characteristics, such
as biochemical composition, which may be a food safety concern," the CFIA
paper says.
"Stress-related developmental problems in young clones
may also present an indirect food safety concern. This may lead to increased
usage of antimicrobials for the treatment of such disease-prone clones and
could also have an effect on the shedding of antimicrobial-resistant
bacteria."
The FDA's review acknowledges no large-scale studies of the
meat and milk of clones have been done. It relies on 10 small-scale studies
involving an average of just five clones each.
Five of the 10 studies found statistically significant
differences between food from clones and conventionally bred animals.
Chavatte-Palmer did one of those five studies. She found
cow clones reached puberty an average of 62 days later than normal animals,
which she said "probably will affect the quality (of their meat) ... The
full maturation of muscle is delayed in clones."
As well, she found milk from cow clones had different
levels of some fatty acids and enzymes than milk from conventional animals. She
concluded more research is needed on whether the differences could cause food
allergies.
For pork, the FDA cited only two studies involving seven
clones in total, both done by biotech company ViaGen. They found the clones
grew 30-per-cent slower than normal animals and had less meat. Two of the
clones had so many health problems their data wasn't even included in the final
results. The FDA questioned the study because of the small number of clones.
No studies have been done at all on food from goats, the
third clone species that the FDA okayed.
***
For all the talk about clones, the fact is we're actually
unlikely to ever see a clone T-bone at the butcher shop. That's because clones
are up to 10 times more expensive to produce than conventional animals -
$10,000 to $16,000 for a cow and $6,000 for a pig.
The main source of clone-derived food is likely to be
naturally bred offspring of clones. The FDA says clone offspring have fewer
health problems than clones and are identical to normal animals.
But the CFIA background paper says there is
"limited" data on food from clone offspring and cited two major U.S. reviews
of the issue that expressed concern about the "inconclusive evidence"
about the safety of their food.
The FDA's report cited no studies on meat or milk from the
offspring of cows or goats and only two studies on pork from the offspring of
pig clones. The clone offspring were mostly the same as conventional animals,
but like the clones had several differences: Of 58 nutrients tested, clone
offspring meat had significantly less of seven nutrients, while more of two
others. It was also somewhat fattier, more acidic and shrunk more during
cooking - indications of poorer quality.
There is also little longer-term research about the health
of offspring as they age.
The FDA review says the offspring seem to be healthier than
their clone parents because their genetic errors are "reset."
But one of the scientists the FDA cites in its review says
he disagrees with the agency's conclusion.
Dean Betts, an associate professor of biomedical sciences
at the University Guelph ,
is one of the few scientists to have looked into the health of clone offspring.
Betts found the offspring of goat and sheep clones have
genetic abnormalities - significantly shorter telomeres, which are the
chromosome endings that are believed to control aging and susceptibility to
cancer.
Shorter telomere lengths could explain why many clones seem
to age faster than normal animals. Dolly the sheep was also found to have
shorter telomeres.
"We don't know what it means or if it has health impacts,"
Betts said. "I would say not enough study has been done ... There could be
some impacts on the species itself over generations."
In France ,
Chavatte-Palmer had hopes of getting some definitive answers to the questions
about the health and food of clones and their offspring. But her cloning work
has ground virtually to a halt. Funding has dried up, she says, because cloning
is a sensitive issue for grant-funding agencies.
"We have piles of data that we haven't had time and
money to get help to analyze," she said. "It's very difficult to get
funding in this area of research. It's frustrating, very frustrating."
Are we already dining on clones?
No labels on clone food in U.S.
That’s one of the surprising revelations from documents on
cloning from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency obtained under the
access-to-information legislation.
About 800 cloned dairy cattle produced through an early
version of cloning called embryonic-cell nuclear transfer and from embryo
splitting have been registered in Canada since the 1980s, said a CFIA
background paper on cloning written in 2006.
The CFIA paper said food from these clones can be sold to
Canadian consumers. “There is generally no restriction on the marketing of
products, by-products or the progeny of animal clones that are produced using
the embryo-splitting technique in Canada or
elsewhere,” it said.
The CFIA paper didn’t say whether milk from the cloned cows
was indeed sold to consumers. An agency spokesperson didn’t respond to a
request for comment.
Health Canada ,
however, says no food from clones, including embryonic-cell nuclear-transfer
clones, can be sold in the country. “It shouldn’t be on the market,” said Paul
Duchesne, a department spokesman.
Embryonic-cell nuclear-transfer was used in the 1980s and
early 1990s but was replaced in the mid-1990s by an improved technique called
somatic-cell nuclear-transfer cloning, which replicates an adult animal,
instead of an embryo.
Donald Coover, a Kansas veterinarian
who says he has sold clones and their semen to farmers in the U.S. for
years, said hundreds of embryonic-cell nuclear-transfer clones were produced in
the U.S. and
that their meat and milk quietly entered the U.S. food
supply without any official safety review.
He said it’s very likely the same thing happened in Canada .
“Nobody at the time made a big deal about it.”
And now that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has
okayed clone food for human consumption, the CFIA again seems to have no plan
for keeping it out of the country, according to an internal email sent by a
manager at the agency.
“CFIA has no specific regulatory controls for animal
clones,” said the email, dated Feb. 14, a month after the FDA’s decision last
January. “There are no special tracking provisions.”
The issue of tracking food from clones is complicated by
the fact that the FDA has decided not to label the food, and there’s no way to
test if a particular animal is a clone.
“All we’ve had are some preliminary discussions on… the
feasibility of detection,” said a CFIA official, who spoke off the record
because she is not authorized to talk with journalists. “Nothing has been put
in place, and no policies have been created around that.”
“We haven’t discussed it very much,” said spokesman Patrice
Juneau. “It’s not a very important issue for us.”
The 3,800-member Fédération des producteurs de porcs du
Québec, also has no position, said spokeswoman Nathalie Hansen.
“It’s very, very expensive to produce cloned animals right
now. Farmers are not ready to pay that kind of money. Practically, it doesn’t
make sense.”
Sauvé said existing reproductive technologies are more
efficient and cheaper and also offer the advantage of improving a herd’s
genetics if two top animals are bred together, while clones can only be as good
as their progenitors.
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