We’ll be seeing an interview of Mae-wan Ho, a 72-year-old “geneticist known for her critical views on genetic engineering and neo-Darwinism. Ho has authored or co-authored a number of publications, including 10 books, such as The Rainbow and the Worm, the Physics of Organisms (1993, 1998), Genetic Engineering: Dream or Nightmare? (1998, 1999), and Living with the Fluid Genome (2003).” [Wikipedia]. That is forthcoming. Also, get into this powerful issue of retracting a scientist’s work, because that scientist has findings AGAINST the almighty, all-Garden-of-Eden magic of genetically transferred-bombarded-fixed-engineered crops (sic) and meat (sic) industry. Retracting work so the feeding trough of chemical-oil-seed monopolies-BigAg can grow the unnatural human and other flora-faun killing system that will be the new-new normal.
The thrust of this interest for me in Washington State are the thug-tactics of Monsanto, grocery association(s), and all the other cartels in the unnatural foods game who are holding human and ecological health in their financial cross-hairs. Another motive was some campaigning for Initiative 522 (whoopee, labeling GMO foods, not banning them!) which was ahead in WA state in August, but got trammeled in the November election with those $25 million or more coming in to propagandize these Monsanto-terminator gene companies and their lock-step-and-fearful-farming-giants as heroes in a world that has turned upside down. You have to call food ORGANIC, but the pesticide-fungicide-fumigated-artificially-fertilized stuff is regular or normal, AKA, Conventional Agriculture? Absurd. So, these kids and BabyBoomers with communications BAs and marketing masters and psychology PhDs just love any job, anything to keep their little brains stimulated, even working as Little Eichmanns in this powerful ecocide-generating force. They cut and paste, write white papers, do silly social media blasts, make up YouTube fun, and just run around like little servants of Edward Bernays’ ghost, Sieg Heil propagandist king:
[The] American business community was also very impressed with the propaganda effort. They had a problem at that time. The country was becoming formally more democratic. A lot more people were able to vote and that sort of thing. The country was becoming wealthier and more people could participate and a lot of new immigrants were coming in, and so on.
So what do you do? It’s going to be harder to run things as a private club. Therefore, obviously, you have to control what people think. There had been public relation specialists but there was never a public relations industry. There was a guy hired to make Rockefeller’s image look prettier and that sort of thing. But this huge public relations industry, which is a U.S. invention and a monstrous industry, came out of the first World War. The leading figures were people in the Creel Commission. In fact, the main one, Edward Bernays, comes right out of the Creel Commission. He has a book that came out right afterwards called Propaganda. The term “propaganda,” incidentally, did not have negative connotations in those days. It was during the second World War that the term became taboo because it was connected with Germany, and all those bad things. But in this period, the term propaganda just meant information or something like that.
So he wrote a book called Propaganda around 1925, and it starts off by saying he is applying the lessons of the first World War. The propaganda system of the first World War and this commission that he was part of showed, he says, it is possible to “regiment the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments their bodies.” These new techniques of regimentation of minds, he said, had to be used by the intelligent minorities in order to make sure that the slobs stay on the right course. We can do it now because we have these new techniques.
This is the main manual of the public relations industry. Bernays is kind of the guru. He was an authentic Roosevelt/Kennedy liberal. He also engineered the public relations effort behind the U.S.-backed coup which overthrew the democratic government of Guatemala.
His major coup, the one that really propelled him into fame in the late 1920s, was getting women to smoke. Women didn’t smoke in those days and he ran huge campaigns for Chesterfield. You know all the techniques—models and movie stars with cigarettes coming out of their mouths and that kind of thing. He got enormous praise for that. So he became a leading figure of the industry, and his book was the real manual.
—Noam Chomsky
So, for now, read and support the retraction of the retraction process for this big PharmJournal publisher. But, even as Washington State defeated I-522, we are NOW being forced with stopping more disease farming a la GE …. Well, Franken-Apples. Read this coming from one of my old groups where I was once a board member, WSFFN, Washington Food and Farming Network. Again, the plea is never just straightforward clean. Note the McDonald’s rejoinder. Really, McDonald’s, in the news for its GMO potatoes, it’s rotten food, and, well, TREATING workers like the VERY SLUGS their artificial foods kill! You know, breaking news of McD’s workers on strike, for a $15 an hour MINIMUM.
This from the Yes on 522 Coalition. Again, sustainability without SOCIAL Justice? We can’t trumpet McDonald’s for one greenwashing-ecoporn thing while they chop the heads off of PEOPLE, COMMUNITIES, LOCAL economies.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is poised to approve the first genetically engineered apples – the Arctic Golden Delicious and Arctic Granny Smiths.
We need your help before USDA’s final public comment period ends December 9.
Please join us in telling USDA to reject approval.
The Washington State apple industry has declared its opposition to approval because key export markets, including Japan, China and India, won’t accept GE foods, or at least require labels. McDonald’s and Gerber recently joined Friends of the Earth in siding with apple growers and consumers urging rejection of this unnecessary, risky and unlabeled apple.
These GE apples already are being grown experimentally in Washington apple country, posing risks to our environment and apple farmers. They’re genetically engineered using an experimental technique for suppressing genes called RNA interference, which many scientists are concerned can have negative, unintended impacts on consumer health and the environment.
*****Now, the Séralini issue follow. You can read another background report from Mae-wan Ho here at DV: “Ban GMOs Now.”
*****
Retracting Séralini Study Violates Science and Ethics
Publishing giant of fake pharmaceutical journals fame now retracting damning research findings against GMOs and Roundup herbicide on behalf of the biotech industry Dr Mae-Wan Ho and Prof Peter Saunders
Sign the Open Letter on Retraction and Pledge to Boycott Elsevier (see below the image)
Please circulate widely and repost, but you must give the URL of the original and preserve all the links back to articles on our website. If you find this report useful, please support ISIS by subscribing to our magazine Science in Society, and encourage your friends to do so. Or have a look at the ISIS bookstore for other publications
Giles-Eric Séralini, a professor of molecular biology at Caen University, led a toxicological study on GM maize and Roundup herbicide involving 200 rats over a period of two years; it found an alarming increase in early death, large tumours including cancers, and diseases of the liver and kidney. The study, published in 2012 by the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology (FCT) [1], was by no means the first, nor the only one to show adverse health impacts from GM feed or Roundup herbicide (see [2] GM Cancer Warning Can No Longer Be Ignored, SiS 56; and ISIS report [3] Ban GMOs Now for a comprehensive review on the health and environmental hazards of GMOs). It was the latest warning – perhaps the most dramatic – and the most in-depth long-term toxicological study ever done. Significantly, many of the most damaging effects came after 90 days, the officially mandated period of feeding trials for regulatory approval of GMOs.
What followed was a concerted worldwide campaign to discredit the findings, including the appointment of ex-Monsanto scientist Richard Goodman to the newly created post of associate editor for biotechnology at FCT [4]. Soon after Goodman’s appointment, a study by researchers in Brazil also finding potentially harmful effects from GMOs was withdrawn from FCT, but reappeared almost immediately in another journal.
On 27 November 2013, FCT editor Wallace Hayes wrote to Séralini’s team requesting them to retract their paper published just over a year ago on grounds that it was “inconclusive”, not because there was fraud or errors [5]. In fact, the paper was published after peer review by 5 referees – the usual number being 2 or 3 – and the criticisms post-publication answered in full by the team, and appeared in the same journal [6].
The substantive criticisms boil down to two: the Sprague-Dawley strain of laboratory rats used is inappropriate, as it is prone to cancer, and the number of animals for testing cancer is too small. In fact, the study was explicitly aimed not at cancer but at toxicity, for which Sprague-Dawley is the strain most commonly used; and the number of animals, 10 in each group, was in accordance with the OECD guidelines.
The reason the OECD protocol specifies larger groups for cancer testing than for toxicity is that cancer is less common and takes longer to become apparent and is therefore more likely to be missed, i.e. the aim is to avoid a false negative. The fact that excess tumours and cancer was detected even in 10 animals is arguably all the more significant, and may be due to the strong carcinogenic potential of the agents tested (see [7] Excess Cancers and Deaths with GM Feed: the Stats Stand Up, SiS 56). Even though the study was not designed to test for cancer, it would have been totally irresponsible for Séralini and his group not to report what they had found. Equally it is important for the article to remain in the public record for its implications on public health.
As Séralini’s team pointed out, the retraction of their paper is a violation of the international ethical norms as prescribed by COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) accepted by FCT, as it had been most thoroughly reviewed, and by the clear admission of the FCT editor, absolutely no fraud or error was perpetrated [5]. In contrast, a study published by Monsanto in the same journal in 2004 does contain errors if not outright fraud, basically because the effect of GMOs was not compared with matched isogenic non-GMO controls, while the feed for controls was most likely contaminated with GMOs. That paper should be considered for retraction, but the issue was never even raised.
A day later, a press release was put out by a PR company entitled, “Elsevier announces article retraction from journal Food and Chemical Toxicology” [8], making it clear that the decision came from the highest level, the publishing giant that describes itself as “a global company employing more than 7,000 people in 24 countries,” and “partner with a global community of 7,000 journal editors” [9].
References.
*****
Just to let everyone know. Our statement has been launched and is open for signing for both scientists and non-scientists. We’ve had 20 new signatures within the past hour since launch. Please go to: ISIS-OpenLetter.
Thanks, Maewan
Open Letter on Retraction and Pledge to Boycott Elsevier
The background to this open letter is described in “Retracting Seralini Study Violates Science & Ethics” (ISIS report)
To: Wallace Hayes, Editor in Chief
Food and Chemical Toxicology (FCT)
Cc: Elsevier
Re: “Long term toxicity of a Roundup herbicide and a Roundup-tolerant genetically modified maize,” by GE Séralini et al, published in Food and Chemical Toxicology 2012, 50(11), 4221-31
Your decision [1] to retract the paper is in clear violation of the international ethical norms as laid down by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), of which FCT is a member. According to COPE, the only grounds for retraction are (1) clear evidence that the findings are unreliable due to misconduct or honest error, (2) plagiarism or redundant publication, or (3) unethical research. You have already acknowledged that the paper of Séralini et al (2012) contains none of those faults.
This arbitrary, groundless retraction of a published, thoroughly peer-reviewed paper is without precedent in the history of scientific publishing, and raises grave concerns over the integrity and impartiality of science. These concerns are heightened by a sequence of events surrounding the retraction:
- the appointment of ex-Monsanto employee Richard Goodman to the newly created post of associate editor for biotechnology at FCT
- the retraction of another study finding potentially harmful effects from GMOs (which almost immediately appeared in another journal)
- the failure to retract a paper published by Monsanto scientists in the same journal in 2004, for which a gross error has been identified.
The retraction is erasing from the public record results that are potentially of very great importance for public health. It is censorship of scientific research, knowledge, and understanding, an abuse of science striking at the very heart of science and democracy, and science for the public good.
We urge you to reverse this appalling decision, and further, to issue a fulsome public apology to Séralini and his colleagues. Until you accede to our request, we will boycott Elsevier, i.e., decline to purchase Elsevier products, to publish, review, or do editorial work for Elsevier.
- 1. “Elsevier announces article retraction from journal Food and Chemical Toxicology,” PRNewswire, 28 November 2013.
Signed (26 scientists from 6 countries)
- Henry A Becker, BE, MSc, ScD,FCIC, Killam Laureate 1992, Engineering Medal 1990, Prof Emeritus, Queen’s university, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, ac.usneeuq.eehcnull@rekceb.yrneh
- E. Ann Clark, PhD, Plant Agriculture, University of Guelph (retired), Ontario, Canada ac.hpleugounull@kralcae
- Joe Cummins, Ph D Genetics, Prof Emeritus of Genetics, Distinguished Fellow of ISIS, London, Ontario, Canada, ac.owunull@snimmucj
- Robert M Davidson, MD PhD, FAIS, Internal Medicine, Fellow of the American Institute of Stress, Texas, USA moc.oohaynull@99snortap
- Emilio DelGiudice, PhD, High Energy and Quantum Field Theorist, Prigogine Medalist 2009, Milan, Italy, ti.nfni.imnull@eciduigled.oilimE
- James DeMeo PhD, Geographical Earth Science and Climatology, Orgone Biophyscial Research Lab, Ashland, Oregon, USA, ten.dnimnull@oemed
- Robert S. Dotson MD, Clinical Instructor, University of Washington Medical Center, Ophthalmology Department, Seattle, Washington, USA, ten.sdtnull@nostodr
- Christopher Exley PhD, Professor Bioinorganic Chemistry, Aluminium and Silicon Research Group, Birchall Centre, Lennard-Jones Laboratory, Keele University, Staffordshire, UK, ku.ca.eleeknull@yelxe.c
- Julian Haffegee, M Sc Biophysics, Webmaster & Productions Editor, Science in Society, Milton Keynes, UK ku.gro.sis-inull@seluj
- Mae-Wan Ho, Ph D. Biosafety Expert, Quantum Biologist, Prigogine Medalist 2014, Director, Institute of Science in Society, London, UK ku.gro.sis-inull@oh.w.m
- Brian John, MA D Phil, Ex Durham University, Dept of Geography, Wales, UK, moc.camnull@4nhojnairb
- Rosemary Mason MB ChB FRCA, Award winning ex-editor of medical journal, Scotland, UK, moc.tenretnitbnull@nosam.yramesor
- Ted Mendoza, PhD, Agronomist, University of the Philippines Los Banos, Philippines, moc.liamgnull@1102zdnm.mrafoce
- Eva Novotny, PhD Astrophysicist, Pollen flow, Cambridge, UK, ku.oc.espilc.nenull@ne
- John W. Oller, Jr., PhD, Professor of Communicative Disorders, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, USA, ten.htuosllebnull@rello
- John Palmer, PhD Prof of Mathematics (retired), University of Arizona, Tucson, USA, moc.gnisuohocaronosnull@nhoj
- Gerald Pollack, PhD, Editor-in-Chief, Water, Prof Bioengineering University of Washington, Prigogine Medalist 2011, Seattle, Washington, USA, ude.notgnihsaw.unull@phg
- Arpad Pusztai, FRSE, chemist/biochemist, expert on nutritional and toxicological studies, Budapest, Hungary, uh.enilno-tnull@aszusZ.zcodrab
- Peter T Saunders, Ph D. Theoretical Cosmology, Prof Emeritus Applied Mathematics, Biomathematician, Co-Director, Institute of Science in Society, London, UK ku.ca.lcknull@srednuas.retep
- Vandana Shiva, Ph D. Quantum physics, winner of Right Livelihood award & numerous other prizes, honorary degrees from numerous universities worldwide, Director of Navdanya, New Delhi, India, moc.liamgnull@avihs.anadnav
- Eva Sirinathsinghji, Ph D. Neuroscience & Molecular Biology, Staff Writer for Science in Society, Institute of Science in Society, London, UK ku.gro.sis-inull@ave
- Nancy Swanson Ph D. Quantum optics, 5 US patents & author of books, Seattle, Washingon, USA moc.tne-sucabanull@nosnaws
- Stephanie Seneff Ph D. Senior Research Scientist, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Cambridge, Mass, USA, ude.tim.liascnull@ffenes
- Lucija Tomljenovic PhD, Senior Research Scientist, University of British Columbia Faculty of Medicine, Canada, moc.liamgnull@77tajicul
- Oscar Zamora PhD Professor and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, University of the Philippines Los Banos, The Philippines, moc.oohaynull@aromazbo
- Lucille Elna P. de Guzman, PhD, Seed Technology/ University of the Philippines Los Banos, hp.ude.punull@1namzugedpl
Read one of Maewan Ho’s works here:
GM Ban Long Overdue: Dozens Ill & Five Deaths in the Philippines
Unexplained sicknesses and deaths
In July 2003, a farmer living in a small village in the south of Mindanao Island of The Philippines, found himself and his entire family suddenly falling ill with fever and respiratory, intestinal and skin ailments. They were not alone; at least fifty-one residents of Sitio Kalyong (Barangay Landan, Polomolok, South Cotabato Province) had similar complaints at around the same time. They all lived within 100 m of a field planted with GM maize, and their illnesses coincided with the GM maize flowering time.
Another resident of Sitio Kalyong, said [1] that the GM-maize pollen made him dizzy, gave him severe headaches, chest pains and caused him to vomit. The field in Sitio Kalyong belonged to a local official who bought five bags of Monsanto’s Bt maize seed (Dekalb818YG with Cry1Ab from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis ), enough to plant 5 hectares. He paid 4 500 pesos per bag, which was more than twice as much as the non-GM variety at 2 200 pesos per bag. The premium price included the promise of a small vehicle if the harvest turned out to be good, as it was supposed to. In the event, the promise was broken on both counts: the harvest of 93 sacks compared poorly with the usual 150 sacks per ha, and the small vehicle was never delivered. The local official stopped planting the Bt maize after 2003.
As part of an investigation to determine what made the villagers ill, one of the farmers was “volunteered” to venture inside the Bt maize field in the presence of more than 10 witnesses, as he explained to me via an interpreter. “Within 5 minutes, I could not breathe and felt something extraordinary on my face,” he recalled. The others could see that his face had swollen up and remarked that it was “very dangerous”. In fact, the farmer is ill to this day. Every now and again, he feels weak in his limbs and numb in his hands and feet. He held up the back of his right hand to show me the index finger. A yellowish-brown discoloration and thickening of the fingernail had developed since he was exposed to the GM pollen. In October 2003, blood samples were taken from the affected villagers who still had symptoms, which were then frozen and analysed. Antibodies to the Bt toxin Cry1Ab expressed in the GM maize were found in all the blood samples taken from the 38 individuals.
Many if not all of the villagers exposed to GM-maize pollen in 2003 have remained ill to this day. Furthermore, there have been five unexplained deaths in the village. In total, 96 people got sick. In addition, nine horses, four water buffalos, and 37 chickens died soon after feeding on GM maize.
Denial and intimidation
The government’s doctors had dismissed the illnesses as “influenza” and refused to investigate further. Meanwhile, without additional funding to proceed with independent studies, no follow up of any kind has been done, despite the continuing unexplained illnesses and deaths.
No more GM-maize has been grown in Sitio Kalyong after 2003, but further planting took place elsewhere in Polomolok, in Tupi, Tampala Tampakan and in Marbel and several other towns in South Cotabato. The harvested cobs were sold as food in the open market, even though the yellow maize is intended for animal feed, and yellow maize is generally not eaten as food in the Philippines.
MASIPAG (a farmers-scientists organisation) had asked the government to stop distributing Bt maize in March 2004, and warned farmers to be vigilant when buying seeds to avoid Bt maize [2]. They pointed out that Monsanto’s Bt maize had been commercialised without adequate safety tests for health or the environment.
A concerned farmer travelled the country speaking of the plight of the villagers of Sitio Kalyong. This alerted people to further cases elsewhere in Mindanao (see below).
In November 2004, a Monsanto employee reportedly arrived in Sitio Kalyong accompanied by three large men on motorcycles that had no license plates. They asked for the activist farmer, indicating that they wanted to “negotiate” with him. Alarmed and intimidated, his neighbours said he wasn’t home; telling off the gang at the same time. No such visits have occurred since. The incident has made me wary about naming any individual in this report.
More illnesses in 2004
More illnesses were reported in July 2004 when GM maize fields in four separate villages of Mindanao came into flower, I was told by a farmer who fell ill in 2003. Thirty-two people in Tuka, Bagumbayan, Sultan Kudarat, suffered from headache, stomach-ache, dizziness, diarrhoea, vomiting and difficulty in breathing. About 30 ha were planted with Dekalb 818YG, but most of the residents affected were tenants, and hence not aware that what they planted was Bt maize, or even what Bt maize really was. Most farmers in Bagumbayan were aware of “Bt maize” based only on what Monsanto has told them. Bagumbayan is a “pet area” of Monsanto, after having won an award in 1999 for being the second biggest user of Power herbicide in the world. In South Sepaka, Sto. Nino, South Cotabato, nine were reported sick, but 31 signed a petition circulated by a member of the Parish Social Action Center, claiming they fell ill during the flowering period of the Bt maize. Symptoms included red eyes, dizziness and weakness. Around two ha were planted with Pioneer 30Y 50, a Bt maize. The Bt maize belonged to a seed dealer who apparently failed to inform the village chairman that he had planted Bt maize. Most of the residents temporarily left their houses.
Around 20 children (aged 5-10 years) got sick during the flowering period of the Bt maize Dekalb 818YG planted near the elementary school in Magallon, M’lang, North Cotabato. They showed symptoms similar to those in other locations: cough, sneezing, asthma and difficulty in breathing. An authorized dealer had planted 10 ha without informing the community that it was Bt maize, but did say that the maize could not be roasted and eaten. One man ate a cob and got diarrhoea; the same happened to four goats that ate the maize.
Despite the unexplained illnesses and deaths, the Philippines government has failed to even initiate a safety enquiry, or set up post-market monitoring of health impacts. Instead it authorised commercial planting of Monsanto’s Roundup Ready maize in February 2005, and later, a new GM maize variety with stacked Bt-toxin and Roundup tolerance; and approved the import of 19 GM products for food, feed and processing.
Feelings were running high in the Philippines as I began my lecture tour at the International Conference on Safe Food, 9-10 December, in Manila, Luzon. At the closing plenary, more than 250 participants from religious and farmers organisations, local government officials and academics from all over the Philippines called for a ban on GMOs in food, agriculture and fisheries.
Similar sentiments were expressed in Mindanao at the forum on Safe Food and Food Security, 12-13, in Davao City, and also at the International Forum on Genetic Engineering and Sustainable Agriculture on 15 December, Central Mindanao University, Musuan, and especially at Xavier University, 16 December, Cagayan de Oro. Farmer after farmer spoke from the floor, denouncing the government for approving the commercial release of Bt maize without safety tests, then failing to ban the Bt maize or to conduct a proper enquiry after it was implicated in serious health impacts including deaths, and instead giving approval to further releases of potentially more dangerous GM crops and products, including Roundup Ready soya (see below). Roundup Ready soya was approved for food, feed and processing only, not for field releases; but this is an artificial distinction as the soya seeds processed as tofu are the same seeds that the farmers plant.
Global ban and safety enquiry long overdue as more damning evidence accumulates
For years, the pro-GM lobby has been denying and dismissing all evidence pointing to the health hazards inherent to the GM technology. Meanwhile, more damning evidence has surfaced.
A research team led by Dr Irina Ermakova of the Russian Academy of Sciences reported in October 2005 that 36 percent of rats born to pregnant rats fed Roundup Ready GM-soya starting from before the rats conceived were severely stunted, compared with 6 percent of rats born to those fed non GM-soya. Within three weeks, 55.6 percent of the progeny of GM-soya fed rats died; a death rate six to eight times that of progeny from rats fed non-GM soya, or a diet without added soya [3].
When interviewed on BBC recently [4], Dr Ermakova said that she has now repeated the experiment three times with very similar results each time; the average death rate within three weeks of birth was 51 percent in the group fed GM-soya compared to around 6 percent in the two control groups. In addition, a third of surviving animals in the GM-fed group show markedly reduced body weight and lack normal internal organ development.
New research in Canberra Australia demonstrated that a previously harmless protein in bean when transferred to pea caused inflammation in the lungs of mice and provoked reactions to other proteins in the feed [5]. Immunological and biochemical studies carried out for the first time on the transgenic protein revealed that it is processed differently in the alien species, turning the innocuous protein into a strong immunogen. In addition, the transgenic protein promoted immune reactions against multiple other proteins in the diet. In other words, it provoked dangerous food sensitivities. As practically all the transgenic proteins involve gene transfer to an alien species, they will be subject to different processing. All transgenic proteins, therefore, can potentially cause serious immune reactions including allergies [6]. Yet, none of the transgenic proteins commercially approved for food and feed had received the regimen of tests now carried out on the transgenic pea protein. This omission is a most serious public health issue; and warrants an immediate ban on GM food and feed until proper assessment on the immune potential of all the transgenic proteins has been carried out.
These latest developments are the most dramatic and revealing in the light of previous scientific and anecdotal evidence that have been suppressed and dismissed, or simply not followed up (see Box). I should mention a series of reports from the Universities of Urbino, Perugia and Pavia in Italy that have also come to light. They document many changes in the cells of young mice fed GM soya. The acinar (secretory) cells of the pancreas showed a pattern of changes associated with a decrease in the synthesis of the digestive enzyme a -amylase in mice fed GM-soya compared with controls [7, 8]. In liver cells, however, the GM-soya fed mice showed a pattern of changes associated with an increase in metabolic rate compared with controls [9, 10] (“liver of mice fed GM soya works overtime”, SiS 20). Some of those changes could be reversed by a change of diet from GM-soya to non-GM soya; but equally these changes could be induced in adult mice by switching their diet from non-GM to GM-soya [11]. There were also alterations in the Sertoli cells (cells nurturing the developing sperms) and the sperm cells in the testes associated with a decrease in transcription in young mice fed GM-soya compared with those fed non-GM soya [12].
Damning evidence against the safety of GM food and feed
* Pregnant female rats fed GM soya gave birth to severely stunted progeny and others in the litters that died within three weeks (see main article)
* GM-soya affected cells in the pancreas, liver and testes of young mice (see main article)
* Rats fed a Monsanto GM maize developed serious kidney and blood abnormalities [13]
* Villagers in the south of the Philippines suffered mysterious illnesses when a Monsanto GM maize hybrid came into flower; antibodies to the Bt protein in the GM maize were found in the villagers, and there have been five unexplained deaths (see main article)
* A dozen cows died after eating a Syngenta GM maize and more in the herd had to be slaughtered due to mysterious illnesses [14]
* Dr . Arpad Pusztai and colleagues found young rats fed GM potatoes damaged in every organ system including an increase in thickness of the stomach lining to twice that in controls [15]
* Scientists in Egypt found similar effects in mice fed another GM potato [16]
* The US Food and Drug Administration had data dating back to early 1990s showing that rats fed GM tomatoes had developed small holes in their stomach [15]
* Chickens fed Aventis’ glufosinate-tolerant GM maize were twice as likely to die compared with controls [17]
* New research demonstrated that a harmless protein in bean when transferred to pea caused inflammation in the lungs of mice and provoked reactions to other proteins in the diet (“Transgenic pea that made mice ill”, this series)
Commenting on some of the evidence presented here, Dr. Michael Antoniou, Reader in Medical and Molecular Genetics at King’s College London, had this to say [18]: “If the kind of detrimental effects seen in animals fed GM food were observed in a clinical setting, the use of the product would have been halted and further research instigated to determine the cause and find possible solutions. However, what we find repeatedly in the case of GM food is that both governments and industry plough on ahead with the development, endorsement and marketing [of] GM foods despite the warnings of potential ill health from animal feeding studies, as if nothing has happened. This is to the point where governments and industry even seem to ignore the results of their own research! There is clearly a need more than ever before for independent research into the potential ill effects of GM food including most importantly extensive animal and human feeding trials.”
A global ban on GM food and feed is long overdue. There must also be a comprehensive enquiry into the safety of GM food and feed, and into the systematic suppression and denial of the incriminating evidence.1
More — by Mae-wan Ho — “Chronicle of An Ecological Disaster Foretold.”
Interview of Mae-wan coming up!!!