Canadian 'U-turn' Exposes Poor GM Safety Testing in US 

NLP Wessex 23aug01

This action by the Canadian Government has serious implications for the USA which has one of the weakest regulatory codes for GM foods in the developed world. If it is now clear that the Canadian GM testing system is full of holes, then they have a major, if not greater, problem in the US too. Both countries operate regulatory systems based on the increasingly discredited principle of 'substantial equivalence' which the Canadian Royal Society described as "scientifically unjustifiable" in a report published in January.

The change in direction by the Canadian Government is a de facto acceptance that many of the criticisms of GM regulation made in the Royal Society report, after initial rejection, are now being accepted as valid (another interesting example of how public denial of GM risks by officials and other figures in authority, is not matched by their real private concerns. Often such an approach is taken to protect the biotech industry even when the science indicates that unacceptable risks are being taken - viz also BSE in the UK).

Royal Society of Canada Expert Panel Raises Serious Questions About the Regulation of GM Food 
Press Release and Executive Summary of Report 5feb01

".........over the past six months senior officials from Health Canada and two other federal departments have, the story says, drawn up a plan to implement many of the more than 50 recommendations on tightening regulations on GM foods......the government's apparent about-face is a blow to the report's critics, who will get a further setback next month when the report is reprinted in the scientific, peer-reviewed Journal Of Toxicology. Such an action is reserved for serious scholarly work". TORONTO STAR, August 23, 2001

What is the US going to do NOW in the face of these revealing admissions by its principal partner in the NAFTA free trade zone? It looks like NAFTA is now knowingly permitting free trade in inadequately tested GMOs.

"The CDC. [Centres for Disease Control] now says that food is responsible for twice the number of illnesses in the United States as scientists thought just seven years ago..." New York Times, 18 March 2001 (this time period co-incides with the mass introduction of GM food into the US diet)

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Ottawa Changes Mind on GM Food Report: Findings Health Officials to Act on Denounced Study Peter Calamai / Toronto Star 23aug01

OTTAWA - The federal government has, according to this story, quietly changed its tune about a controversial scientific report that said Canadians aren't adequately protected from the risks of genetically modified foods and other biotech products.

The story says that Health Canada officials had denounced the report's key finding, which said the main concept underlying federal rules on modified products was "scientifically unjustifiable."

Yet over the past six months senior officials from Health Canada and two other federal departments have, the story says, drawn up a plan to implement many of the more than 50 recommendations on tightening regulations on GM foods.

The recommendations came from a panel appointed by the Royal Society of Canada, described as the nation's elite science academy.

The story also says that the government's apparent about-face is a blow to the report's critics, who will get a further setback next month when the report is reprinted in the scientific, peer-reviewed Journal Of Toxicology. Such an action is reserved for serious scholarly work.

Yet the controversy set off by the February report is far from over, especially since Canada is the third-largest producer of genetically-modified crops in the world.

About 40 modified types of corn, potatoes, tomatoes, squash, oilseed and other plants have already been approved by the federal government, with minimal publicity.

Only last week, a study for the Canadian General Standards Board proposed that Canadian companies should be allowed to claim their food was GM-free even if products contain as much as 5 per cent genetically-modified material. That's five times the European standard.

As well, a new study on the safety of modified foods is to be published today by the Canadian Biotechnology Advisory Committee, whose members are appointed by Ottawa.

This report is expected to take issue with some of the Royal Society's most criticized findings.

Doug Powell, a University of Guelph food safety expert who was on the committee that wrote the new study, was quoted as saying, "The Royal Society report contains numerous excellent recommendations. At the same time there were numerous omissions."

But the co-chairs of the Royal Society's expert panel were cited as saying in interviews that their concerns were "seriously addressed" in a recent draft version of a federal action plan.

Co-chair Conrad Brunk, an ethics expert from the University of Waterloo, was quoted as saying, "Now they're admitting they've got problems and they have to take our report seriously. They've changed their tune. At first they suggested we just didn't understand the regulatory system."

The other co-chair, University of British Columbia biotechnology researcher Brian Ellis, was cited as saying panel members pointed out numerous shortcomings in the proposed plan, adding, "There was a lot of bureaucratese, a fair amount of meaningless hand waving."

Both men were further cited as saying the controversial central finding of the Royal Society report has been strengthened by new scientific evidence. The report criticized federal regulators for regularly exempting genetically modified plants from a full safety assessment if they appeared to be no different than ones produced by traditional cross-breeding techniques.

The government's confidence in this "substantial equivalence" approach was not scientifically justified, the panel said.

The Royal Society pointed to research published in Nature magazine in 1999, which said a GM plant was 20 times more likely to pollinate other plants than naturally occurring mutant plants with the identical genetic make-up to the GM plant.

Ellis was cited as saying that this "unexpected and unexplained" result has since been duplicated by the same researchers at the University of Chicago.

".....there is no precise harmonisation of methodologies to assure the safety of transgenic food products, it being difficult to use traditional animal feeding studies for toxicological assessments. This clearly raises biosafety issues for the use of GM products in food. In vivo and in vitro validated nutritional-toxicological testing procedures are urgently required. .....if the testing procedure investigated in this project does not allow assessment of the toxicity of the gene products introduced into the food product via the GM plants, the whole strategy for the safety assessment of novel foods from GM plants will need to be revised". New methods for the safety testing of transgenic food (SAFOTEST) [European Commission research project not due for completion until 2004] http://europa.eu.int/comm/research/quality-of-life/gmo/04-food/04-04-project .htm Contract number QLK1-1999-00651; Period February 2000 - February 2004; CoordinatorI. Knudsen, Institute of Food Safety and Toxicology Søborg (DK)

"For a third search [of scientific information on the health risks of GM foods using the Medline scientific database] I used the phrase 'genetically modified foods,' which gave 101 citations. Only four citations corresponded to experimental studies in which the potential adverse health effects of GM foods were evaluated..... In contrast to this very scant number of experimental studies, 37 citations were again letters to the editor, comments, opinions, or briefs. Most of them were written by proponents of the safety of transgenic foods, and only a minority showed scepticism or were opposed to the indiscriminate consumption of GM foods. However, the common denominator of all 37 citations was the fact that the opinions and comments were not based on experimental data.

One of the more surprising results of this review was the absence of citations of studies performed by biotechnology companies. If, as I assume, safety and toxicity studies of GM foods have been carried out by these companies, why have the results not been subjected to the judgment of the international scientific community, as would be the course if such research were published in reputed journals?

To corroborate my findings with Medline (1-8), I performed similar searches in a second database, Toxline ( http://igm.nlm.nih.gov ). Among the citations found, there were no new references concerning direct studies on the potential toxicity or adverse health effects of GM foods. The only possible exception was a few articles, mostly reviews, on the risks for allergic patients and the potential allergenicity of novel foods.

With respect to the above findings, I suggest to biotechnology companies that they publish results of studies on the safety of GM foods in international peer-reviewed journals. The general population and the scientific community cannot be expected to take it on faith that the results of such studies are favorable. Informed decisions are made on the basis of experimental data, not faith".

Article on the abscence of data on GM food safety testing published in Science magazine June 2000, by Jose L. Domingo, Department of Toxicology, School of Medicine, "Rovira i Virgili" University, San Lorenzo 21, E-43201 Reus, Spain. E-mail: jlldr@fmcs.urv.es  Science 2000 June 9; 288: 1748-1749 http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/288/5472/1748

The big lie - GM foods have been tested as safe - Mystery of missing research - click here: http://www.purefood.org/ge/biglie.cfm