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Bovine Growth Hormone (BGH)
MSNBC Re 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, 2001
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 Iıve 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 farmersı tendency to give antibiotics to cows to counteract the
drugıs 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, that's 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 donıt know because they haven't
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).
Reprinted with permission from Organic
Consumers Association.
www.purefood.org/rbgh/msnbconrbgh.cfm
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