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By Francesca Lyman
When she became pregnant with her son
a decade ago, Anne
Kutay of Seattle worried that milk boosted with genetically-engineered
hormones could cause "harmful side effects that might
emerge later."
While some thought she was being overly
cautious, Kutay stood strong and switched to organic milk
free of such additives, never to return to conventional brands.
Is she - and
hundreds of others who now boycott gene-modified dairy products
- right?
"People say, why go to that trouble
and pay more, when there's no proof it's any better?"
Kutay asserts. "I say, 'Read about it and decide for
yourself.' Everything I've read since then has made me feel
good about having started taking those precautions years ago."
Health-conscious consumers like Kutay
are driving a
boom in sales of natural
and organic products, now the fastest growing segment
of the food industry. Such consumers are undoubtedly what
made Starbucks respond to the March 20 boycott aimed at getting
them to stop using milk and dairy products made with recombinant
bovine growth hormone (rBGH), a genetically engineered version
of a growth hormone extracted from cows' pituitary glands
that greatly increases milk output, by as much as 20 to 30
percent.
The company uses some 32 million gallons
of milk per year in their coffees, milk shakes and ice creams.
If even "some of our customers have concerns about the
presence of rBST in milk products," CEO Orrin Smith said,
the company is taking "measures to address those concerns."
Recombinant bovine somatotropin (rBST) is another name for
rBGH.
But this isn't just for the health-conscious, says Cummins
of the Organic Consumers Association, who believes this campaign
could revive long-dormant public opposition to the hormone-enhanced
dairy products. Already, he says, new fears about "mad
cow" disease and other ailments affecting the commercial
livestock industry are fueling growing consumer demand for
"meat, milk and dairy products labeled as organic, which
come from cows that are not injected with rBGH."
For a while, "Everyone forgot about
rBGH, even though most Americans, when polled in 1996, said
they considered it dangerous," says Cummins, citing a
University of Wisconsin study revealing that 74 percent of
the American public considered the recombinant hormone a hazard
and 94 percent favored mandatory labeling.
Today, says Cummins, speaking of activists
who showed up at Starbucks protest sites in 100 cities earlier
this month, "They say, 'I don't want any more hormones
in my food, and I don't want to be part of a system that's
cruel to dairy cows.'"
According
to Monsanto, which makes rBGH, the drug is injected into about
30 percent of U.S. dairy cows.
The milk is shipped throughout the country, added to products
such as cream, cheese, yogurt and baked goods - but never
labeled as such.
Monsanto says that milk produced by rBGH
is no different from "natural" milk in terms of
safety. However, critics like Dr. Samuel Epstein, professor
of environmental and occupational medicine at the University
of Illinois School of Public Health in Chicago, point to dozens
of studies that say otherwise.
For example, Epstein charges, studies
have shown that insulin-like
growth factor-1 (IGF-1), a protein that is present in slightly
higher levels in milk from hormone-treated cows than "natural"
milk, has been linked to cancer in many studies.
Another health risk, suggests William von Meyer, a retired
chemist who tested chemicals for the chemical company Rohm
& Haas, is that the
protein could enhance diabetes in people prone to the disease.
The presence of a protein in milk could
serve to prevent the hormone from being degraded right away,
adds Michael Hansen of Consumers Union, which also opposes
use of the drug. "The more you look at this, the more
questions arise," says Hansen.
FDA dismissed such safety concerns years
ago when it approved the drug in November 1993, after a long
battle with activists and some small dairy farmers, who opposed
it due to health and safety concerns. Two FDA scientists concluded
in the journal Science that no significant toxic side effects
that would cause health harms were found among rats fed the
hormone.
Canadian Debate
In Canada, however, where rBGH was heatedly
debated several years ago, government scientists who reviewed
the data upon which FDA's approval of the drug was based came
to a starkly different conclusion.
Shiv Chopra is one of five government
scientists at Canada's Health Protection Branch who found
evidence that FDA had seriously
overlooked - or, he claims, possibly even suppressed - studies
showing adverse reactions in rats.
"Although the paper published in
Science gave the product a clean bill of health," says
Chopra, "the US FDA ignored the harder information, a
90-day study of rats showing that the hormone did indeed get
absorbed into their bloodstreams, and that
it produced antibodies and lesions."
Chopra, who spoke to MSNBC shortly after
a gag order was lifted regarding his speaking to the press,
said, "I'm afraid to say that despite all that is known
about the adverse reactions that cows have to the drug, and
ample evidence of human health concerns as well, that the
US government took an expedient route to approval with this
drug." The results, he adds, have greatly benefited Monsanto.
Chopra and others authored a report opposing
the drug, which, he says, the pharmaceutical giant was pressuring
Canada to approve. In their so-called "rBST Gaps"
report, the scientists found, for example, that not only was
orally administered rBST absorbed into the bloodstream of
these rats but it also weakened their immune systems.
They also pointed to the need for long-term
toxicology studies to ascertain human safety. Another concern,
they said, was farmers' tendency to give antibiotics to cows
to counteract the drug's tendency to induce mastitis, or udder
swelling. And overuse of antibiotics in animals has been linked
to the growing problem of antibiotics resistance.
Canada Rejects Approval
Based mainly on those concerns, Canada
in 1999 rejected approval of the hormone. The decision came
after a widely publicized scandal in which veterinarian and
Health Canada reviewer Dr. Margaret Haydon testified to a
Canadian Senate committee how her files on bovine growth hormone
were stolen from her office; she also appeared on "The
Fifth Estate," a Canadian TV program, and alleged how
Health Canada had been offered a million dollars in research
funding by Monsanto if the hormone were approved.
In the United States, meanwhile,
Canada's rejection of the drug unleashed an avalanche of criticism
of the FDA and Monsanto. The Center for Food Safety and some
20 dairy farm organizations and other groups petitioned FDA
to withdraw the drug, charging that more studies needed to
be done to prove it safe.
Two reporters, Jane Akre and Steve Wilson,
tangled with their employers, Fox TV, over a documentary debating
the safety of rBGH that was to air in Tampa, Fla. The reporters
alleged that Monsanto prevailed over the TV management to
censor and rewrite their script, so they sued. Last August,
a jury agreed with the reporters and awarded Akre a $425,000
settlement.
FDA stands by its approval, continuing
to maintain that rBGH milk is no less safe than natural milk.
"We feel that there is natural IGF-1 in any milk anyway,
and against the background of IGF-1 in the body already, [what's
added in treated milk] amounts to very little," Stephen
Sundlof at FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine told MSNBC.
The lesions that showed up in the rat
study, says an agency memo, don't "appear to be related"
to the rBGH the rats were fed; also, the antibodies found
in rat plasma were "relatively low" and "not
expected to have any adverse effect," FDA writes.
Health Canada's Chopra disagrees. When
lesions showed up in the rats in Monsanto's study, that's
precisely when FDA should have called for more studies, "instead
of subjecting the public to unknown risks without their knowledge
and consent," he says. "FDA may think this is an
insignificant risk for the public," he charges, "but
they don't know because they haven't tested it fully."
Francesca Lyman is an environmental and
travel journalist and editor of the American Museum of Natural
History book, ?Inside the Dzanga-Sangha Rain Forest? (Workman,
1998).
msnbc.com
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