UK experts urge better safety tests for GM food
Date: 07-Oct-99
Country: UK
They said the standard measure known as 'substantial equivalence' -
showing a GM food is chemically similar to its natural equivalent -
should be ditched because it is not accurate enough to prove safety for
human consumption.
"If policymakers are to provide consumers with adequate protection, and
genuinely to reassure them, then the concept of substantial equivalence
will need to be abandoned," Erik Millstone, a food safety policy expert
at the University of Sussex, said in a commentary in the science journal
Nature.
Millstone and his colleagues say the measure, used in the United States
and Europe, is not really an indicator of safety at all.
They say it is just a tool for industry to push through GM foods without
conducting experiments that could add up to $25 million to the research
and development of a new product and delay its introduction to the
marketplace by up to five years.
"It's not really a measure at all. It is something that purports to be a
test but isn't," Millstone told Reuters. "It's a vague hand-waving
concept that is invoked as an excuse for not requiring tests and it is
misrepresented as if it was a test."
Millstone and his co-authors, Eric Brunner of University College London
and Sue Mayer of the independent monitoring group GeneWatch UK, said the
concept was introduced in 1993 by the Organisation for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD).
It was endorsed in 1996 by the United Nations Food and Agriculture
Organisation (FAO) and the World Health Organisation (WHO) and has been
used since then.
"The biotechnology companies wanted government regulators to help
persuade consumers that their products were safe, yet they also wanted
regulatory hurdles to be set as low as possible," the scientists added.
They argue that 'substantial equivalence' should be replaced with a
better method that would test the safety and toxicity of GM foods and
not merely take them for granted.
