Cloned Meat May Already Have Invaded Our Food Supply, Posing Alarming Health Risks

It's just a matter of time before we are eating clones, if we are not eating them now.

When Canadian agricultural leaders asked Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack last week after a scandal about unlabeled clone products in Europe if "cloned cows or their offspring have made it into the North American food supply," he said, "I can't say today that I can answer your question in an affirmative or negative way. I don’t know."

And when AlterNet asked the USDA this week if cloned products are already in the food supply, a spokesman said the department was "not aware of an instance where product from an animal clone has entered the food supply" thanks to a "voluntary moratorium"-- but that offspring of clones, at the heart of the Europe scandal," are not clones and are therefore not included" in the voluntary moratorium.

Sounds like Europe is not the only place eating milk and meat from unlabeled clone offspring. In fact, the BBC, UK newspapers and even a US grocer all report that US consumers are digging into clone food, whether or not they know it.

Like bovine growth hormone and Roundup Ready crops, the government says clone products are so safe they don't need to be labeled. But the 2008 FDA report (PDF), Animal Cloning: A Risk Assessment and a report from the European Food Safety Authority released at the same time, raise questions about the health of cloned animals, the safety of their milk and meat and even the soundness of the clone process itself.

To clone an animal, "scientists start with a piece of ear skin and mince it up in a lab. Then they induce the cells to divide in a culture dish until they forget they are skin cells and regain their ability to express all of their genes," writes the Los Angeles Times' Karen Kaplan. "Meanwhile, the nucleus is removed from a donor egg and placed next to a skin cell. Both are zapped with a tiny electric shock, and if all goes well the egg grows into a genetic copy of the original animal."

So far so good except that it turns out many clones lack the ability to "reprogram the somatic nucleus of the donor to the state of a fertilized zygote," says the FDA report and be the perfect replica a clone is supposed to be.

The reprogamming problem, called epigenetic dysregulation, means many clones -- some say 90 percent -- are born with deformities, enlarged umbilical cords, respiratory distress, heart and intestine problems and Large Offspring Syndrome, the latter often killing the clone and its "mother," the surrogate dam. Clones that survive epigenetic dysregulation often require surgery, oxygen and transfusions at birth, eat insatiably but do not necessarily gain weight and fail to maintain normal temperatures, admits the report.

While denying that such dysregulation is endemic to cloning, the FDA report nonetheless reassures readers that "residual epigenetic reprogramming errors that could persist" in clones will "reset" over time. The errors will also "reset" in offspring who, though "the same as any other sexually-reproduced animals," may nonetheless have them. Oops.

The FDA report, written in collaboration with Elizabethtown, PA-based Cyagra and Austin, TX-based ViaGen, another clone company, tries hard to talk around these and other clone problems. Too hard.

Although clones' calcium, phosphorus, alkaline phosphatase and glucose levels exceed those seen in normal animals, "all of the elevations can be explained by the clones' stage of life or stress level, and the increased levels observed do not represent a food consumption risk," says the report.

The "slight mammary development" in a 4 1⁄2 month old Jersey calf? Such precociousness "sometimes occurs in conventional heifers if they are overfed."