Post by kimmsr🕊 on Apr 5, 2018 5:29:02 GMT -5
From the people at Organic Consumers Association
Sign Today! GMO Animals Should Be Regulated!
GMO Animals? image of a piglet with its nose in the airDear Anon,
If you think genetically modified salmon is a bad idea, wait ‘til you hear what kind of GMO animals Recombinetics, Inc., the “Monsanto of the genetically modified animal industry,” wants to unleash on the market.
Among other things, Recombinetics wants to genetically engineer pigs specifically to withstand a miserable life in factory farms. Not only that, but the St. Paul, Minn.-based biotech company wants to keep the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) from having anything to do with regulating GMO pigs, or any other GMO animals that could end up in the U.S. food supply.
TAKE ACTION: Tell the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA): Genetically modified animals need to be thoroughly safety tested by the FDA!
Recombinetics president & CEO Tammy Lee Stanock recently published an opinion piece that argued for ending FDA oversight of genetically modified animals in favor of “putting the USDA exclusively in charge of regulating all food animals.”
The advantage for Recombinetics is obvious. The FDA uses its regulations for animal drugs to review the safety of genetically modified food animals, such as GMO salmon. But the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has no process whatsoever for evaluating the safety of animals created through novel technologies, including the gene editing technology used by Recombinetics.
If the company’s plan succeeds, this would be the most drastic deregulation of biotechnology to date—and gene editing is just too risky to deregulate.
The authors of a recent study published in Nature Methods, “Unexpected mutations after CRISPR-Case editing in vivo,” found that gene-editing technology can introduce hundreds of unintended mutations into the gene-edited animal’s genome.
Mutations in certain genes can lead to cancer in the animal. And there’s been no testing done to determine the impact on human health of eating animals with these mutations.
The only way to adequately review the safety of an animal that results from the use of a CRISPR technology, one of the technologies used by Recombinetics, is to sequence the whole genome of a gene-edited animal and compare it with a non-edited control. This is what the FDA should require of companies like Recombinetics—before their products enter the food supply.
TAKE ACTION: Tell the USDA: Genetically modified animals need to be thoroughly safety tested by the FDA!
Thanks!
Alexis for the OCA team
P.S. To avoid GMOs, including Recombinetics gene-edited animals, buy USDA Organic!
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