Don't Let President Obama's Food and Drug Administration Approve Genetically Engineered Salmon!
President Obama's F.D.A. is using a secret process designed to review veterinary drugs to rule on what could be the first genetically engineered animal to enter the food supply, genetically engineered salmon.
The confidential drug evaluation process does not fully assess food safety or environmental impacts and blocks public input. The public will never see, let alone have the opportunity to rebut, the information AquaBounty Technologies, the developer of the genetically engineered salmon, submits to the F.D.A. And, the F.D.A. is not conducting or soliciting independent research to determine whether the salmon is safe to eat or release into the environment.
Public opinion surveys show that Americans are even more wary about genetically engineered animals than about the genetically engineered crops now used in a huge number of foods.
The government doesn't require genetically engineered foods to be labeled. Foods must be labeled, it says, only if they are different in their nutritional properties or other characteristics. AquaBounty is trying to make the case to the F.D.A. that its salmon is indistinguishable from normal Atlantic salmon in terms of taste, color, vitamins, minerals, fatty acids, proteins and other nutrients.
But, AquaBounty's franken-salmon is clearly different from normal salmon. It has been engineered to grow twice as fast, reaching its full size in 18 months.
Since the information the F.D.A. is collecting on AquaBounty's salmon is considered proprietary, the public isn't being told how the genetically engineered animal would be produced or what impact the trangenic salmon could have on human health and the environment. Here are a few unknowns:
1. How does AquaBounty get the foreign DNA into its franken-salmon? One way to do this is to use viruses to "infect" cells with the new DNA. If a virus is used as a vector, a cancer risk is created.
2. Does AquaBounty's franken-salmon contain novel proteins or other molecules produced by the transgenic organisms that could trigger allergies? Allergic reactions, a known risk of genetically engineered foods, can result in serious trauma, even death.
3. When people eat AquaBounty's franken-salmon, will the transgenic DNA be incorporated into the genomes of the bacteria in the human digestive tract? A human study conducted by the UK's Food Standards Agency found that a single serving of genetically engineered soy can result in "horizontal gene transfer," where the bacteria of the gut takes up the modified DNA from the soy.
4. What are the human health impacts of producing food from salmon that are deformed by genetically engineered growth hormones? According to an expert panel from the Royal Society of Canada, scientists have documented "deleterious consequences to fish morphology, respiratory capacity, and locomotion associated with the introduction of growth hormone (GH) gene constructs in some transgenic variants of salmonids, notably Pacific and Atlantic salmon." The panel concluded that this "is the rule rather than the exception in fish ... [and] has been manifested by changes to enzyme activity, gross anatomy, behaviour and, in all likelihood, hormonal activity." The human health impacts of producing food from salmon that are deformed by genetically engineered growth hormones is unknown.
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