FDA says no to clone label

[RaftPeople]

@SaintCad

I interpreted as we presume safety if the experts at the FDA say it is safe.

I’m really not sure what the limits of Renob’s position are, which is why I asked the question. He/she stated that the FDA takes too long and that we should assume safety, which is why I asked if he/she thought we should not have any testing, but I never got an answer to that question.

@SaintCad

I would also argue that drug safety and food safety are two seperate issues. Drug safety is based on reports that the drug companies give the FDA and most of the dangers come from fraudulent reports from the companies or doctors prescribing drugs in a dangerous manner outside their typical use (like Phen-Fen). Food safety is fairly straightforward to test for since most of the dangers come from contaminated food.

I would agree, food safety and drug safety are not identical, again the question was asked to try to get clarification on Renob’s position.

However, I would disagree that food safety from cloned animals is the same as food safety from existing sources. There are clearly differences in the resulting biology of the cloned animals and it’s really new territory for the scientists involved.

@SaintCad

As for long-term effects, it think there are a lot more dangers in drugs than cloned or irradiated food that have been tested independently by the FDA. Thus the argument relating drug safety to food safety is at best an invalid analogy and at worst a strawman argument.

Again, asked to clarify the extent of Renob’s “presume safety” position.

[RaftPeople]

@Miller

How much testing would you consider “enough?”

I would think we need the following:

1. Years (5?) of feeding to rats and other animals
2. Multiple generations of the cloned offspring: test the animals and test the food products
3. Test food products, not just for things we look for today, but analyze the details of the different molecules that make up the food product and compare to non-cloned animals. Not sure to what extent this has been done, but the studies I saw seemed to just check for a subset of the contents of the food product.

It’s entirely possible that enough studies have been done, but I don’t see very many studies when I google.