April 2006
What You Need To Know About GMOs
If you want to eat healthy, it’s more complicated than just buying fresh produce. Now you also have to consider the source
By Jeffrey M. Smith
The next time you find fresh corn at the produce section, you might want to find out if it is genetically engineered before taking it home to your family. That corn may be genetically modified (GM) to produce a toxic pesticide in every kernel you eat. The pesticide is called Bt toxin and it kills bugs by rupturing their stomachs.
Bt crops were created by taking a gene from a soil bacterium (Bacillus thuringiensis or Bt) and putting it into the DNA of a plant. Bt corn was approved as a food on the assumption that the toxin is completely harmless for humans. Based on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s finding that genetically engineered proteins in a type of Bt corn are safe, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last year determined that presence of this Bt corn in the food and feed supply poses no safety concerns.
Bt toxin is thoroughly destroyed during digestion and it is not bioactive in mammals, only bugs, according to the companies that produce it. But some evidence contradicts this. When mice were fed regular potatoes (not genetically modified) that were treated with Bt toxin, they developed abnormal and excessive cell growth in the lower part of their small intestines, according to research published in the journal, Natural Toxins. In a second study published in the Brazilian Journal of Medical and Biological Research, mice that were fed Bt toxin developed a powerful immune response.
In a separate agribusiness study, rats fed Bt corn showed changes in their blood cells, livers and kidneys, suggesting the presence of disease. Last year, an industry spokesman dismissed the physical changes as minor and said critics were making waves over minor “statistical issues.” Still, we don’t know exactly what the rats in the study had because no follow-up tests were conducted.
But an analysis of the rat study last year by myself and Prof. Arpad Pusztai, a European expert on genetically modified organisms (GMOs), correlated the physical changes with diseases that could have been present in the rats. We listed such possibilities as allergies, infections, toxins, anemia, blood pressure problems, elevated blood sugar, kidney inflammation and organ lesions. According to Professor Gilles-Eric Séralini, a scientist who reviewed the study for a French commission, the response by the rats was similar to reactions caused by pesticides.
Farm Reports
Collecting news reports from 2000 on and interviewing some farmers first-hand, I have found around two dozen farmers in the U.S and Canada who say that certain Bt corn varieties caused their pigs to become sterile, have false pregnancies or give birth to bags of water. A farmer in Germany claimed that in 2001-02 a certain variety of Bt corn killed 12 of his cows and caused others to fall sick, according to a Greenpeace account reported on the web site of the London-based Institute of Science in Society (ISIS).
Bt in its natural state is used by organic farmers to spray on their fields, and it degrades completely in a few days. A 1999 EPA-funded study published in Environmental Health Perspectives showed that workers exposed to the spray developed an antibody response and several allergic symptoms. The form of the Bt in GM corn, however, is engineered to be more toxic than the spray. There have been no human clinical trials on the effect of Bt crops, but there are numerous news reports from around the world about people claiming to have reacted to it.
In 2003, Filipinos living next to a GM cornfield developed skin, respiratory, and intestinal symptoms and fever while the corn was pollinating. Blood tests on 39 of the Filipinos were conducted by the Norwegian Institute for Gene Ecology. All showed an immune response to the Bt toxin created by the GM corn, which supports — but does not prove — a connection with the symptoms. But additional evidence was recently provided by geneticist Mae-Wan Ho, who interviewed victims of this mysterious illness. One man claimed that when he went into the cornfield to investigate the source of the symptoms, his face swelled up and he had difficulty breathing. In his village, 96 people got sick and nine horses, four water buffalos and 37 chickens died soon after feeding on GM corn. There were also five unexplained human deaths. The mysterious symptoms reappeared in other Filipinos living near Bt cornfields in 2004, but only when the corn was flowering — when they were breathing the pollen. Dr. Ho reported on the ISIS website that approximately “20 children (aged 5-10 years) got sick during the flowering period of the Bt corn … planted near the elementary school …. They showed symptoms similar to those in other locations: cough, sneezing, asthma and difficulty in breathing.”
The Case Against GM Foods
A news report from Madhya Pradesh, India published on Webindia123.com in November 2005 claimed that farm workers handling Bt cotton developed allergic reactions. Twenty-three patients, including 10 severe cases, suffered allergic symptoms within about five hours of gathering, lifting and even touching the cotton, according to this story: “Farmers’ skin turned red, swelling occurred, eyes reddened and breathlessness was experienced. Some victims suffered a burning sensation in the eyes, watering, itching, swelling of eyelashes, sneezing and running noses.” Those who covered their bodies remained unaffected. Villagers also reported that cattle that ate Bt cottonseed died.
While these reports are not conclusive, it is part of mounting evidence that makes a strong case against GM foods. The risks are not just from the pesticide-producing varieties. Some GM crops are engineered with a gene that allows them to survive applications of herbicide.
Studies at the University of Urbino in Italy showed that mice fed GM soy had misshapen nuclei in their liver cells, suggesting a possible response to an elevated level of toxins. In a separate Urbino study, GM soy-fed mice also had dramatic reductions in enzyme production in their pancreas.
In 2005, a leading researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences reported astounding results in her study on GM soy and mortality among newborn rats. Dr. Irina Ermakova added GM soy flour to the diets of female rats starting two weeks before conceiving and continuing through pregnancy and weaning. More than half of their offspring (55.6 percent) died within three weeks. By comparison, only 9 percent of the offspring from mice fed non-GM soy died. The average weight of the GM soy group was also substantially less.
This study, which was published in the Russian journal Ecosinform this year, is small in size and preliminary. The implications, however, are severe. The American Academy of Environmental Medicine agrees and in November 2005, they called on the U.S. National Institutes of Health to immediately replicate it.
Tracking DNA Changes
The only human feeding trial on GM crops was done in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. Results published in Nature Biotechnology in January 2004 showed that when humans ate GM soy products, the gene that had been inserted into the soy transferred into the DNA of gut bacteria. This could mean that long after you stop eating GM soy burgers or other products, you might still have the GM protein produced inside your intestines.
There are numerous ways in which GMOs may produce unpredicted side-effects. When the foreign gene is inserted into the DNA, it can be truncated, inverted, fragmented or scrambled. According to lab reports in two laboratories in Paris and The Scientific Institute of Public Health (IPH) in Brussels, the foreign genes may even spontaneously rearrange over time. Thus, GM crops may be unstable, creating proteins that were never intended or tested.
In addition to problems in the foreign gene, the process of insertion can disrupt the DNA’s own natural genes. According to an extensive review of studies on the subject, published in 2006 in the Journal of Biomedicine and Biotechnology, natural genes can be deleted, scrambled, turned off or permanently turned on.
A GM crop might therefore produce a variety of unpredicted effects. According to internal memos from the FDA that were made public from a lawsuit, agency scientists had warned their superiors in the early 1990s that GM crops could create allergens, toxins, new diseases or nutritional problems. They had urged their superiors to require long-term safety studies. But the person in charge of policy was Michael Taylor, a former vice president for public policy at Monsanto. The policy that he crafted for the FDA is still in place today.
It declares that no safety studies on GM crops are required. If the biotech companies claim their GM foods are safe, they don’t even have to tell the FDA if they put them on the market. The FDA declined to respond to this story.
Biotech producers do participate in a voluntary consultation with the FDA, in which they typically present summaries from what appear to be superficial studies. The one company that presented complete data from an animal feeding study in the early 1990s was for the FlavrSavr tomato — the very first commercialized GM crop, which was engineered for longer shelf life. According to FDA documents now public, several of the rats that ate the tomato developed stomach lesions and seven of 40 died within two weeks and were replaced. Political appointees approved the tomato, in spite of concerns and unanswered questions raised by government scientists. A few years later, the tomato was withdrawn for marketing reasons, according to its producer.
An interesting anecdote from that study is that the rats refused to eat the GM tomatoes. They had to be force-fed.
For more information, visit responsibletechnology.org or call, 641-209-1765.
Jeffrey M. Smith is the director of the Iowa-based Institute for Responsible Technology, and has produced “The GMO Trilogy, Why Genetically Modified Organisms threaten your health, the environment and future generations,” a two DVD and one audio CD set that is expected to be for sale in natural food stores in April.
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