No Labels for Cloned Food

[Devotay]

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The government has decided that food from cloned animals is safe to eat and does not require special labeling.

The Food and Drug Administration planned to brief industry groups in advance of an announcement Thursday morning. The FDA indicated it would approve cloned livestock in a scientific journal article published online earlier this month.

Consumer groups say labels are a must, because surveys have shown people to be uncomfortable with the idea of cloned livestock.

However, FDA concluded that cloned animals are "virtually indistinguishable" from conventional livestock and that no identification is needed to judge their safety for the food supply.

"Meat and milk from clones and their progeny is as safe to eat as corresponding products derived from animals produced using contemporary agricultural practices," FDA scientists Larisa Rudenko and John C. Matheson wrote in the January 1 issue of Theriogenology.

What does the "virtually" part mean?

Read the whole story here

[Nathan]

well, a clone is literally indistinguishable from an identical twin (slight caveat about the mitochondrial dna..since it borrows that of the oocyte...but that's too technical to matter).

put differently, an identical twin is a perfect clone. literally.

Edited December 28, 2006 by Nathan (log)

[WHT]

Beef and pork are raised through artificial insemenation. I don't see this as bieng too different from that. If anything I see things likewhole new bands comming from it.

[Pan]

Hasn't cloning been shown to rapidly accelerate aging in sheep? Then how do we know there may not be something dangerously different about eating meat from cloned animals? I think we do not have enough data to compare cloning to artificial insemination and should be cautious about cloned sources of meat.

[k43]

Here, at least, we should use reason instead of emotion.

There's a tiny reason to be suspicious of genetically modified foods. They're NOT what they were before, and people can work up fear of them even though selective breeding has been used from before the dawn of history.

By contrast, a cloned animal is identical to the prior generation.

Cloning is far too expensive to use to create herd animals for slaughter. It's used to duplicate the best breeding stock.

[iguana]

What does the "virtually" part mean?

It means "you could possibly tell the difference if you had a staff of trained molecular biologists expert in the fields of cloning and molecular ageing."

[Mallet]

Hasn't cloning been shown to rapidly accelerate aging in sheep? Then how do we know there may not be something dangerously different about eating meat from cloned animals? I think we do not have enough data to compare cloning to artificial insemination and should be cautious about cloned sources of meat.

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As far as I know, cloning is still a very imprecise technique, with the majority of clones dying prematurely: the surviving offspring (as you mention) often suffer many disorders related to dysfunctional gene expression. While the DNA sequence may be identical, many other important factors (e.g: epigenetic markers) are not, which causes me concern.

If cloning is only to be use to propagate broodstock, then I don't see the point in allowing cloned animals to enter the foodchain.