I know I’m a little late posting this news, but for those of you who haven’t heard yet, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has released their report that concludes that food from clonded animals and their offspring is safe. The agency has asked producers of cloned animals to continue their voluntary moratorium on the sale of meat and milk from clones and their offspring at least temporarily.
A long-awaited final report from the Food and Drug Administration concludes that foods from healthy cloned animals and their offspring are as safe as those from ordinary animals, effectively removing the last U.S. regulatory barrier to the marketing of meat and milk from cloned cattle, pigs and goats.
But, recognizing that a majority of consumers are wary of food from clones — and that cloning could undermine the wholesome image of American milk and meat — the agency report includes hundreds of pages of raw data so that others can see how it came to its conclusions.
The report also acknowledges that human health concerns are not the only issues raised by the emergence of cloned farm animals.
“Moral, religious and ethical concerns . . . have been raised,” the agency notes in a document accompanying the report. But the risk assessment is “strictly a science-based evaluation,” it reports, because the agency is not authorized by law to consider those issues.
In practice, it will be years before foods from clones make their way to store shelves in appreciable quantities, in part because the clones themselves are too valuable to slaughter or milk. Instead, the pricey animals — replicas of some of the finest farm animals ever born — will be used primarily as breeding stock to create what proponents say will be a new generation of superior farm animals.
When food from those animals hits the market, the public may yet have its say. FDA officials have said they do not expect to require food from clones to be labeled as such, but they may allow foods from ordinary animals to be labeled as not from clones.
To create its final risk assessment, the FDA gathered data on nearly all of the more than 600 U.S. farm-animal clones produced and hundreds of their offspring, as well as many from overseas.
“Food from cattle, swine, and goat clones is as safe to eat as that from their more conventionally-bred counterparts,” the FDA risk assessment concludes.
Looking ahead, the report says FDA is collaborating with veterinary and scientific organizations, notably the International Embryo Transfer Society, to create a database on the health of new clones, which will help the agency track the field as the industry grows.