Monsatan ordered to publish

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Author	Topic: Monsatan ordered to publish
LaneH Member	posted 06-13-2005 12:56 PM quote: Judges have ordered the publication of a secret study which has raised fears that eating GM food may harm human health, after it was revealed in The Independent on Sunday last month. A court in Cologne last week granted Greenpeace access to the 1,139-page study - by the giant biotech firm Monsanto - which found that rats fed a modified corn had smaller kidneys and raised levels of white blood cells and lymphocytes compared with those fed a non-GM corn. The EU is a truly diseased place. ------------------ lane h. can be reached at laneman@erols.com "Never let your mind remain so open that your brain falls out." IP: Logged
tralfaz Member	posted 06-13-2005 01:05 PM Link? IP: Logged
annef Moderator	posted 06-13-2005 01:06 PM Link. Anne [This message has been edited by annef (edited 06-13-2005).] IP: Logged
LaneH Member	posted 06-13-2005 01:38 PM Thanks Anne. ------------------ lane h. can be reached at laneman@erols.com "Never let your mind remain so open that your brain falls out." IP: Logged
Sam Mc Kee Member	posted 06-13-2005 02:02 PM First thought: Okay, one particular GM food is bad for rats and possibly for people as well. Lots of "natural" foods are bad for you too. Second thought: Other explanations? High white cell count...sign of infection? Was there something in the corn, or otherwise exposed to the rats, that had nothing to do with genetic engineering? IP: Logged
El Buggo Member	posted 06-13-2005 03:53 PM I'd suggest nothing out of the norm. I have not read the paper, but I suspect this is another Arpad Pusztai scenario. The work, in and of itself is fine, but the context and finer details like exposure rate (eg. 10000x normal) will be lost or distorted. Question: would everyday, generic wheat be allowed as a food in today's regulatory climate had it not been in existence for a number of years? IP: Logged
LaneH Member	posted 06-13-2005 05:22 PM If bred conventionally, yes. Which is why you don't see anything about the FlavrSavr® tomato anymore. It was bred back conventionally and those offspring don't hit the regulatory radar. Interpreting toxicology studies on foods is not as straight forward as greeenpeace would like it to seem. First of all, a 1000+ page study is going to encompass a lot of data. The totality of the data is what needs to be examined and also the design of the individual studies that showed some form of effect. Also, just because there are differences between control and test animals doesn't mean there is a problem. Many whole food studies show things like this, but the effect needs to be evaluated in context as Sam the-not-cat points out, white cell increase is not a marker that is likely to be associated with the food outside of some type of infection. And the bladder (I'm not getting to the independent, so it may have been kidney) marker can go along with infection, too. Finally, if Monsanto claims that there are trade secrets, that should be enough to keep it confidential. Greenpeace would never win that suit in this country. Redact the hell out of it before it goes public. But that probably won't happen over there in the land of socialism. These studies are not secret, they are internal studies and they often do contain significant confidential material. And, no, they should not be reviewed by any hack that feels he knows how to interpret a scientific study. ------------------ lane h. can be reached at laneman@erols.com "Never let your mind remain so open that your brain falls out." IP: Logged
Nightman Member	posted 06-15-2005 05:29 AM The media and the green NGOs always use the word 'secret' when they actually mean 'private'. Thus we get secret studies, secret meetings generating the whole conspiracy theory bulls*t. I agree that determining whether food is safe is a difficult and indeed an impossible task. I recently attended a lecture by John Krebs recently retired as the fists head of the new UK Food Standards Agency. The title of his lecture was "Is food safe?" He took the platform, put up the title slide and then said 'No' and sat down. The chairman asked him to elaborate and we had a very interesting presentation about this very issue. I don't know if wheat would be tolerated but peanuts would never make it to the grocery store.... ------------------ Nightman* Who doesn't usually believe everything that he sees in the media. IP: Logged
Sam Mc Kee Member	posted 06-15-2005 11:04 AM What about water? About seven Americans per year die of water poisoning. We can't have grocery stores selling something that's poisonous, can we? IP: Logged

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