Report comment

It seems you haven't done your research Anonymous. There is some very recent research that indicates that GE food may certainly do harm.

Three new studies of the health effects of GM foods have triggered new demands for GM components in human food and animal feed to be banned immediately, and have also led to accusations of criminal negligence aimed at the UK Government and European Commission.

The first of the key studies, conducted by Russian scientist Irina Ermakova, showed that an astounding 55% of the offspring of rats fed on GM soya died within three weeks of birth, compared with only 9% in the control group (1). The second, conducted by Manuela Malatesta and colleagues in the Universities of Pavia and Urbino in Italy, showed that mice fed on GM soya experienced a slowdown in cellular metabolism and modifications to liver and pancreas (2). And the third study, conducted by CSIRO in Australia, showed that the introduction of genes from a bean variety into a GM pea led to the creation of a novel protein which caused inflammation of the lung tissue of mice (3). So serious was the damage that the research was halted, and stocks of the GM pea have been destroyed. The developers have now made a commitment that the "rogue" variety will never be marketed.

These studies, all revealed in the scientific literature within the past few weeks, have caused widespread alarm throughout the world, since two of them suggest that GM soya (used in a large number of foods) might be very dangerous, and since they appear to confirm the findings of Dr Arpad Pusztai and Dr Stanley Ewen, whose paper on physiological changes in rats fed on GM potatoes caused a worldwide sensation in 1999 (4). The authors were given the full "shoot the messenger" treatment; they were widely vilified by the scientific community, and following an intervention from the office of Prime Minister Tony Blair Dr Pusztai was sacked, his research team was dismantled, and his funding stopped. The Ewen/Pusztai research has never been repeated, let alone extended, for fear that their results will also be replicated.