MSNBC Reopens Debate on Safety of Bovine Growth
Hormone in Milk

What is in your milk?

"'Your Environment" on claims that gene-modified dairy products pose health
risks
By Francesca Lyman
SPECIAL TO MSNBC
March 29

When she became pregnant with her son a decade ago, Anne Kutay of
Seattle worried that milk boosted with genetically-engineered hormones
could cause "harmful side effects that might emerge later." While some
thought she was being overly cautious, Kutay stood strong and switched
to organic milk free of such additives, never to return to conventional
brands. Is she < and hundreds of others who now boycott gene-modified dairy
products < right? Do the added hormones, as critics claim, pose serious
health risks? "Your Environment" investigates.

"PEOPLE SAY, why go to that trouble and pay more, when there's no
proof it's any better?" Kutay asserts. "I say, "Read about it and decide for
yourself." Everything I¹ve read since then has made me feel good about
having started taking those precautions years ago."

Health-conscious consumers like Kutay are driving a boom in sales of
natural and organic products, now the fastest growing segment of the food
industry. Such consumers are undoubtedly what made Starbucks respond to the
March 20 boycott aimed at getting them to stop using milk and dairy products
made with recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH), a genetically engineered
version of a growth hormone extracted from cows' pituitary glands that
greatly increases milk output, by as much as 20 to 30 percent.

The company uses some 32 million gallons of milk per year in their
coffees, milk shakes and ice creams. If even "some of our customers have
concerns about the presence of rBST in milk products," CEO Orrin Smith said,
the company is taking "measures to address those concerns." Recombinant
bovine somatotropin (rBST) is another name for rBGH.

But this isn't just for the health-conscious, says Cummins of the Organic
Consumers Association, who believes this campaign could revive long-dormant
public opposition to the hormone-enhanced dairy products. Already, he says,
new fears about "mad cow" disease and other ailments affecting the
commercial livestock industry are fueling growing consumer demand for "meat,
milk and dairy products labeled as organic, which come from cows that are
not injected with rBGH."

For a while, "Everyone forgot about rBGH, even though most Americans, when
polled in 1996, said they considered it dangerous," says Cummins, citing a
University of Wisconsin study revealing that 74 percent of the American
public considered the recombinant hormone a hazard and 94 percent favored
mandatory labeling.

Today, says Cummins, speaking of activists who showed up at Starbucks
protest sites in 100 cities earlier this month, "They say, "I don't want any
more hormones in my food, and I don't want to be part of a system that's
cruel to dairy cows."

According to Monsanto, which makes rBGH, the drug is injected into
about 30 percent of U.S. dairy cows. The milk is shipped throughout the
country, added to products such as cream, cheese, yogurt and baked goods -
but never labeled as such.

Monsanto says that milk produced by rBGH is no different from
"natural" milk in terms of safety. However, critics like Dr. Samuel Epstein,
professor of environmental and occupational medicine at the University of
Illinois School of Public Health in Chicago, point to dozens of studies that
say otherwise.

For example, Epstein charges, studies have shown that insulin-like
growth factor-1 (IGF-1), a protein that is present in slightly higher levels
in milk from hormone-treated cows than "natural" milk, has been linked to
cancer in many studies.

Another health risk, suggests William von Meyer, a retired chemist who
tested chemicals for the chemical company Rohm & Haas, is that the protein
could enhance diabetes in people prone to the disease.

The presence of a protein in milk could serve to prevent the hormone
from being degraded right away, adds Michael Hansen of Consumers Union,
which also opposes use of the drug. "The more you look at this, the more
questions arise," says Hansen.

FDA dismissed such safety concerns years ago when it approved the
drug in November 1993, after a long battle with activists and some small
dairy farmers, who opposed it due to health and safety concerns. Two FDA
scientists concluded in the journal Science that no significant toxic side
effects that would cause health harms were found among rats fed the hormone.

CANADIAN DEBATE
In Canada, however, where rBGH was heatedly debated several years
ago, government scientists who reviewed the data upon which FDA's approval
of the drug was based came to a starkly different conclusion.

Shiv Chopra is one of five government scientists at Canada's Health
Protection Branch who found evidence that FDA had seriously overlooked < or,
he claims, possibly even suppressed < studies showing adverse reactions in
rats. "Although the paper published in Science gave the product a clean bill
of health," says Chopra, "the U.S. FDA ignored the harder information, a
90-day study of rats showing that the hormone did indeed get absorbed into
their bloodstreams, and that it produced antibodies and lesions."

Chopra, who spoke to MSNBC shortly after a gag order was lifted regarding
his speaking to the press, said, "I'm afraid to say that despite all that is
known about the adverse reactions that cows have to the drug, and ample
evidence of human health concerns as well, that the U.S. government took an
expedient route to approval with this drug." The results, he adds, have
greatly benefited Monsanto.

Chopra and others authored a report opposing the drug, which, he
says, the pharmaceutical giant was pressuring Canada to approve. In their
so-called "rBST Gaps" report, the scientists found, for example, that not
only was orally administered rBST absorbed into the bloodstream of these
rats but it also weakened their immune systems. They also pointed to the
need for long-term toxicology studies to ascertain human safety. Another
concern, they said, was farmers¹ tendency to give antibiotics to cows to
counteract the drug¹s tendency to induce mastitis, or udder swelling. And
overuse of antibiotics in animals has been linked to the growing problem of
antibiotics resistance.

CANADA REJECTS APPROVAL

Based mainly on those concerns, Canada in 1999 rejected approval of
the hormone. The decision came after a widely publicized scandal in which
veterinarian and Health Canada reviewer Dr. Margaret Haydon testified to a
Canadian Senate committee how her files on bovine growth hormone were stolen
from her office; she also appeared on "The Fifth Estate," a Canadian TV
program, and alleged how Health Canada had been offered a million dollars in
research funding by Monsanto if the hormone were approved.

In the United States, meanwhile, Canada's rejection of the drug
unleashed an avalanche of criticism of the FDA and Monsanto. The Center for
Food Safety and some 20 dairy farm organizations and other groups petitioned
FDA to withdraw the drug, charging that more studies needed to be done to
prove it safe.

Two reporters, Jane Akre and Steve Wilson, tangled with their
employers, Fox TV, over a documentary debating the safety of rBGH that was
to air in Tampa, Fla. The reporters alleged that Monsanto prevailed over the
TV management to censor and rewrite their script, so they sued. Last August,
a jury agreed with the reporters and awarded Akre a $425,000 settlement.
FDA stands by its approval, continuing to maintain that rBGH milk is
no less safe than natural milk. "We feel that there is natural IGF-1 in any
milk anyway, and against the background of IGF-1 in the body already,
[what's added in treated milk] amounts to very little," Stephen Sundlof at
FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine told MSNBC.

The lesions that showed up in the rat study, says an agency memo,
don't "appear to be related" to the rBGH the rats were fed; also, the
antibodies found in rat plasma were "relatively low" and "not expected to
have any adverse effect," FDA writes.

Health Canada's Chopra disagrees. When lesions showed up in the rats
in Monsanto's study, that¹s precisely when FDA should have called for more
studies, "instead of subjecting the public to unknown risks without their
knowledge and consent," he says. "FDA may think this is an insignificant
risk for the public," he charges, "but they don¹t know because they haven¹t
tested it fully."

Francesca Lyman is an environmental and travel journalist and editor
of the American Museum of Natural History book, "Inside the Dzanga-Sangha
Rain Forest" (Workman, 1998).
___________________________________________________________________________

MSNBC Poll on genetically Engineered recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone
(rBGH)

Would you drink genetically modified milk?
Yes
No
Not sure

Vote to see results
Would you drink genetically modified milk?
Out of 2405 responses
Yes 29%
No 58%
Not sure 14%

Survey results tallied every 60 seconds. Live Votes reflect respondents'
views and are not scientifically valid surveys.