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).

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