Frequently Asked Questions
February 2007
By Althea Zanecosky, MS, RD, LDN
Mid-Atlantic Dairy Association
Q: The news recently reported that meat and milk from cloned animals may soon appear in our food supply. What is cloned milk and is it safe?
A: While in the press recently, the process of animal cloning has been available for about 20 years. Cloning arrived in the news in 1996 with the birth of Dolly the sheep. Since then, agricultural scientists have imagined a time when they could dispense with the uncertainties of conventional breeding and make exact copies of their best animals. Cows were cloned in 1998 and pigs followed in 2000.
Because it was not known if there were any health risks associated with cloning, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) put a voluntary moratorium on the sale of meat and milk from cloned animals. Then in late December 2006, after many years of study, the FDA concluded that cloned meat and milk from cattle, pigs, and goats is as safe to eat as the food we consume every day.
Scientists in the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine analyzed data on the composition of meat and milk from clones and their offspring from hundreds of published reports, and after five years recently released a Risk Assessment. The scientists concluded none of the studies was able to identify any significant differences in either nutrition or safety between the cloned and controls in the meat or milk.
Cloning involves removing the nucleus from a donor egg and replacing it with DNA from a prized animal. If all goes well, a tiny electric shock stimulates the egg to grow into a genetic copy of the original animal. Scientists often refer to clones as identical twins born at a different time. The FDA sees cloning as a natural extension of the reproductive technologies, such as artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization, that livestock breeders have been using for centuries. And cloning is not the same as genetic engineering. Genetic engineering involves adding or taking away genes, while cloning does not change the gene sequence.
Cloned meat and milk will not be on supermarket shelves any time soon. After public comment is collected until the end of March 2007, the agency has to go through it all and incorporate it into its guidelines for the food industry. FDA doesn't expect to finish that process until the end of 2007 at the earliest. The voluntary moratorium on the sale of meat and milk from cloned animals will remain in effect until that happens, so nothing should arrive in stores until at least 2008.
The FDA says that it hasn't yet decided whether food products from cloned animals will require labeling. In general, the agency requires products to be labeled only if they might be misleading or for nutritional labeling. Because FDA has said that meat and milk from cloned animals is indistinguishable from conventionally bred animals, there appears to be no basis for the agency to require labeling.
The cloning process is not very efficient and often requires up to 100 tries to go from egg to live birth. Also, clones are too expensive to produce and too rare to use as meat or as milking cows. Instead, clones will be used like elite breeding stock, "to pass on naturally occurring, desirable traits such as disease resistance and higher-quality meat to production herds," says the FDA.
For more information on cloning see:
http://www.fda.gov/cvm/CloningRA_FAQConsumers.htm
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