Source: http://www.wildflwr.freeserve.co.uk/bio.htm (Original source: The Scotsman 10.3.99) "Humans as GM guinea pigs was EC plan to test safety" by Stephen Breen and Severin Carrell.
We, and our predecessor PSAGEF have been maintaining since 1996 that the food safety assessment methods presently available are inadequate and put the consumers at hazard. We are glad to find that now a document to the European Commission (EC, the excecutive organ of the European union) has been discovered that says that genetically modified foods could not be adequately tested for safety, exactly on the grounds that we have been pointing out.
Dr Richard North, the respected independent food scientist who discovered the EC document, says that the recommendation recognised that traditional toxicological tests on GM foods would not reliably detect problems. The solution according to a report in July 1997 from the EC scientific committee for food, in consultation with the standing committee for foodstuffs, is that GM products need to be released on the market so that large numbers of people can eat them and be monitored over time todiscover any health problems.
The EC report in question on testing of new foods was signed 1997 by the industry commissioner, Martin Bangemann. It states: "Conventional toxicological evaluation methods cannot be applied to foods because foods present particular difficulties not encountered with the testing of food additives and contaminants in vivo [in animals] and in vitro [in the test tube]. The document continues: "To compensate for the inability of employing reasonably adequate safety factors, any subchronic animal feeding studies require supplementation by absorption and metabolism studies in animals and eventually in humans". It adds: "Appropriate information should be derived by combined nutritional and safety post-market surveillance".
Dr North said: "What this is saying is that, given the inability to carry out initial safety testing, the only way safety can be assessed is to release the product for general sale and then monitor the population to see if anyone gets ill. That means exposing hundreds of thousands if not millions of people to a product before they can confirm it is safe. The system requires that the British population becomes an experimental group of guinea pigs."
The requirements for safety testing according to the EU scientific commitee are essentially the same that we have been calling for on the basis of a document by the molecular biologist John Fagan (see The approval of Roundup Ready GE-Soy - based on incomplete evidence).
The argumentation of the Biotech industry has been that foods thar are "substantially equivalent" to their natural counterpart cannot be more hazardous. As you find in the document Substantial equivalence versus scientific food safety assessment, this standpoint has no scientific backing.
Another argument sometimes heard from some Biotech proponents is that it is "extremely improbable" that genetic engineering may give rise to unexpected harmful substances. Also this argument has no scientific backing. It is an established scientfic fact that unexpected harmful substances may appear due to genetic engineering (see New substances may be generated unpredictably). But no research has been done that makes it possible to estimate the probability for such substances to appear. So there is no basis for excluding the possibility that there is a significant risk for unexpected harmful substances to appear in GE food. That is the reason why we have been demanding that all presently marketed GE foods be withdrawn from the market and exposed to very careful safety testing.