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FDA: Cloned Animals Safe to Eat Meg Passerello, Grade 8 |
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On January 15th, 2008, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that meat and milk from cloned animals was safe to eat. As of now, they seem not to see any possible health risks with consumers eating cloned animals. But are there any health risks? The first animal, cloned by Scottish scientists in 1997, was a sheep named Dolly. Dolly died at age six, extremely short of the lifespan she should have lived, due to the fact that she developed a progressive lung disease. Needless to say, despite the fact of cloning an animal at all, it didn’t go as well as it could have. Now, with the FDA’s news, the animals they declared safe to eat are cows, goats and pigs. Sheep, however, are not on their list. Does this not seem fishy to you? The FDA didn’t have enough cited data on cloned sheep, so they aren’t on the list. Now, could someone please explain how this sounds right? As stated above, a sheep was the “It is beyond our imagination to even have a theory for why the food is unsafe,” says Stephen Sundlof, director of the FDA. Clearly their imagination isn’t that vast. Many cloned animals are born with serious health defects. The Food and Drug Administration says that the animals who survive their first few weeks seem to be just as healthy as normal animals. On top of this, they also say that whatever those abnormalities are, they are not passed on to conventionally bred offspring of clones. Right. Then there’s the actual cloning itself. The process sounds simple enough. Scientists take an immature egg, remove the egg’s nucleus, add DNA from a donor cow, (many times taken from the skin cell of an ear) and then give it a small electric shock to coax the egg to divide and grow into a copy of the original animal. One calf, Pricilla, was cloned from a slab of beef. That sounds appetizing, doesn’t it? Though they say the food is safe, I don’t personally think it’s been going on long enough to be sure that it’s completely safe for human consumption. Worse yet, you as a buyer won’t even know if the food you’re eating has anything to do with cloned animals, because the FDA says they aren’t going to put it on the labels – just like with Genetically Modifed foods. Many people – myself included – have issues with animal cloning for reasons completely aside from the health uncertainties. Whether it is ethical or religious reasons, quite a number of people hate the idea of animal cloning. If the animal is cloned, then it was not born naturally, and that doesn’t sit well with a lot of people. Though everyone has their own choice on animal cloning, the FDA has evidently made theirs. Whether or not it’s in our own best interest, we shall find out. SOURCES: |
very first animal cloned. So obviously you would have more collected data possible on a sheep than any other animal. If you don’t have enough data for it to be guaranteed safely edible or not, then I don’t think it’s in the best interest of the FDA to say cows, pigs or any other animal is alright to eat, when they haven’t been cloning them as long. There’s very little possibility that they have more data on cows, pigs or goats than on sheep. If sheep have had health risks and aren’t considered safe to eat, then other animals more than likely have some health risks of their own. 