EU probes food safety of animal clones

CONSUMERS are moving closer to eating meat, milk and cheese from cloned animals, with EU proposals on how they could be approved and authorised for sale.

Up to now, cloned animals,, such as Dolly the sheep, have been off the menu partly because they are so expensive to produce and partly because there has been no legislation on the issue.

A preliminary report from the European Food Safety Agency said the meat and milk from cloned animals appeared to be as safe as that from ordinary animals.

“Based on current knowledge, there is no expectation that clones or their progeny would introduce any new food safety risks compared with conventionally bred animals,”, the report said.

But it warned that this was based on the very small number of cows and pigs cloned and tested so far, and said the data on them was very limited. A large number of the clones had poor health and died early, but this was expected to change as the technology increased, the agency said.

Next month, the agency will host a conference on the safety of meat and milk from cloned animals and will consult member states’ experts before issuing its final opinion.

The public will be able to have a say when the European Commission carries out a survey of attitudes towards cloned food.

The EU ethics committee specialising in new technologies — which includes lawyers, scientists, philosophers and theologians — is also examining the issue and is expected to submit its report later this week.

Nina Papadoulaki, the spokeswoman for health commissioner, Markos Kyprianou, said that the commissioners would then decide on whether to approve cloned food products.

The US is expected to be the first place in the world to allow food from cloned animals to be sold later this year while Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan are investigating the possibility. In the meantime, the commission is going ahead with revising the rules on “novel foods”, that for the first time would include produce from cloned animals.

Novel foods — any food that was not in normal use in Europe before 1997 — have to go through a process taking up to three years before being approved for sale in the EU.

The commission proposals would reduce the time to a year by having all approvals carried out at EU level for all member states.

An average of seven to 10 applications are dealt with by the EU each year for products such as baobab, a dried fruit pulp traditionally eaten in Africa, kiwiberri concentrate used mostly in China and Siberia, and conjugated linoleic acid that is claimed to have some health benefits.

www.efsa.europa.eu/EFSA