The US outdid itself at this Codex meeting. It actually bullied another country into withdrawing its submission because the paper South Africa submitted in favor of Mandatory GM Labeling was so strong and under cut the US position that no labeling should ever be permitted. South Africa is a sovereign nation, with its own concerns, laws and issues, but it was forced by US bullying to rescind its submission because of the international tantrum that the US threw. Read about it here (http://www.prweb.com/releases/GM_Labeling/Codex/prweb909004.htm).
The US DOES NOT want anyone to know if there is GM food in what they are eating under any circumstances. Once the US became aware of South Africa’s paper (apparently before it was generally available to the rest of the meeting), they jumped all over them electronically. This was a major affront to national sovereignty, African and the concept that Codex is anything but a mouth piece for the multinational corporations which the US represents! Africa, however, decided that they have had enough!
Although I am very sorry for the personal and national humiliation which South Africa has been subjected to by the outrageous hubris and imperialism demonstrated by the US, the US may actually have done the world an unintended favor. Their behavior appears to have galvanized the African nations, who have been demanding that Codex supply them with Mandatory GM Labeling for over 15 years, and now see that Codex is not going to do that for them so they will have to do it for themselves. Swaziland, Kenya, Ghana, Egypt, Cameroon, Sudan, Nigeria, South Africa and a host of other African countries came together to express their determination to emerge from CCFL with progress at this meeting for a Codex requirement for Mandatory GM Labeling of foods. South Africa’s submission was part of the discussion.
Once the Agenda item came forward, however, Mama Duck US and her usual band of ducklings following right behind (Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Indonesia, etc.) quacked the same old song: These items are safe because they have been exposed to extensive safety testing (not true – see Attachment II of our Press Release (http://www.prweb.com/releases/GM_Labeling/Codex/prweb909004.htm) to read the FDA’s official position refusing to consider or conduct any safety testing of GM products), that Codex is not about consumer health and safety anyway (not true – see the first Codex mandate (http://www.codexalimentarius.net/web/index_en.jsp), that this issue has already been on the floor for many years and no forward progress was possible so it should be dropped (not true – see the report of the Oslo and Ghana Working Groups (Click on CX/FL 08/36/8 on web page http://www.codexalimentarius.net/web/current.jsp?lang=en) to see the proposals which emerged for forward movement on this issue).
The African nations were unanimous in their support for mandatory labeling. Japan, EU, Switzerland, Norway and other countries once again stated their commitments to Mandatory GM labeling. The CCFL discussion concluded with an agreement to scrap previous labeling documents which were at an early stage of the approval process and instead substitute an appendix contained in the report of the meeting in Ghana on this issue. Although this is a very weak document as it stands now, it does offer the opportunity to keep working on the issue and was thus opposed by the US. This strategy was nonetheless adopted by the CCFL.
Astonishingly, the next morning, AFTER the discussion was completed, the South African paper was withdrawn on the direction of the South African government because of the extra procedural shenanigans of the US through its pressure on South Africa!
That over reaching act of economic imperialism may be the beginning of the end for unlabeled GM foods and crops! The pro-labeling nations of Africa – all of them – were SO incensed that they called another meeting again and determined that they would create their own requirements and adopt them en bloc with, or without, the permission of the Codex Alimentarius Commission! The Natural Solutions Foundation has been asked to continue to provide technical and scientific support, which we will, of course, be very happy to do, as you may imagine.
We are deeply gratified that our work of the past 3 years in Africa and at Codex urging solidarity is coming to fruition. We believe that this change could spread throughout Codex. Apparently, so does the US which has been telling delegates not to speak to us! Imagine! The US has nothing better to do than warn pro-health delegations off listening to us. Could we imagine a better confirmation that what we are doing is having an impact?
Of course, we continue to need your support to make this happen. Please make a tax deductible recurring donation (http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=189) to keep health freedom moving forward. Natural Solutions Foundation is the most effective voice of health freedom and it speaks for you.
Thanks for your help and support!
Yours in health and freedom,
Dr. Rima
Rima E. Laibow, MD
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org
www.Organics4U.org
Songhai, Porto Novo, Benin
Day 3, April 19, 2008
We landed today in Cotonou, the capital of Benin and the shoving began: African airports are like airports everywhere, but worse. Everyone apparently needs to be first, whether there is any point to being first or not.
I don’t need to be first and neither do General Stubblebine or Tyson, so we were pretty close to last – last off the airplane, last through customs, last to get a baggage cart, last to get our luggage.
Tyson, however, was nearly the first of our party to get vaccinated! I am strongly averse to vaccination and, to my mind, the more you study any one particular vaccine, the more you NEVER want to take that preparation. That is certainly the case with Yellow Fever Vaccine. Although many countries in Africa require proof of vaccination against this devastating disease (unnecessary, really, for people who have access to good health, Vitamin C and silver solutions) for entry. Bert, Tyson and I were able to produce exemption letters for our visas and secured our visas for Benin without any difficulty.
I had forgotten that, once you clear passport control and get your entry stamp in Benin, there are two guys in (what once were) white coats asking to see your Yellow Fever Vaccination card with a valid stamp on it. We speak English. They speak French. The possibility of communication was nill to none. Gen. Stubblebine and I tried the words for “Exemption letter†in as many ways as we could think of. We failed miserably. Finally, ready to go home, I suppose, since we were close to the last people on the plane, the two vaccine police men gave up in exasperation and waved their hands, shouting, “Go! Go!†and waving us through the door.
Tyson, however, was separated from us and was not so lucky. Before he knew what had happened, he was sitting in the Health Officer’s Office being asked in French for something (he does not speak French). He, too, kept saying that he had an exemption letter (from me, in fact!) but there seemed to be no uptake on that. He looked up from getting out the letter from his papers and saw that the Health Officer was bending over a refrigerator from which he took a vial and a syringe. “No! NO!” Tyson said and waved his letter of exemption around (probably a little wildly – I know that is the way I would have waved mine!). The man got out a yellow International Vaccination Card, stamped it and said, in perfect English, “Give me 10 Euros [ Approximately $16 US].
Tyson gave him the Euros and the man waved him out of the office WITH a vaccination card but WITHOUT the vaccination!
Once we got through the pushing and shoving at the luggage conveyor, we exited past a Beninese guard who checked every single one of our luggage tags to make sure they matched the numbers on our luggage. With all the people ahead of us, can you imagine how long that took?
Finally we exited the baggage area only to realize that the customs people were opening every suit case of every traveler. I stopped dead and looked around in utter dismay: It was already 9:45 PM and we were clearly going to be here for hours. For some reason (I have no idea what it might have been), the customs official nearest to me looked up, saw me and said, again, “Go! Go!” and we made our way out into the crowd waiting to greet their friends and relatives, associates and colleagues. There was a gentleman in a brilliant and distinctive African suit waving a very welcome “Songhai” sign. We clustered around him and he led us to the van he had brought to pick us up from Songhai.
Because our plane had not come in the night before, his two hour round trip to the airport (and the fuel which is so important in this very poor country) was wasted. He was, however, gracious and helpful nonetheless.
When we got to Songhai Center about an hour later, we were greeted in this oasis of plenty and prosperity in the middle of want and hardship by Father Godfrey Nzamjou, the man whose inspiration lives and breaths in Songhai. Although the restaurant closes at 10, he and his staff had kept it open for us (how different from Paris!) and we had an hour or so to converse and orient ourselves.
We were led to a modern building with suites and bedroom, each with a shower and private bath.
The next day, we toured the compound in the morning and saw the ingenuity, love and tenderness, yes, tenderness with which this land has been turned from a desert into a Garden, perhaps a Garden of Eden. Today, in a world where food riots are becoming more commonplace daily, the fertility which has been coaxed from the land is an urgent lesson for possibilities and a call to action. The Panama Santa Clara Project will follow the Songhai model for farming without waste or pollution. Imagine what we can do with land that is so abundantly fertile!
The heat was truly ferocious and about 11:00AM we retired indoors because anywhere outside was impossibly hot. We had more excellent food, all grown here, and waited for Fr. Godfrey to come back to us for more discussion.
Around 4 PM he arrived and said, “OK. Now you know what we have at Songhai. What are you looking for?” We spoke at depth and at length and videotaped the discussion. I think it is important that you see that and will mount it as soon as we have enough bandwidth to make that possible. It was a wonderful conversation in which we expounded on our dream and Fr. Godfrey said that this was what he had been waiting for.
We agreed that we must support each other’s work and he reaffirmed that he will, without a doubt, come to Panama to set up the design for the zero emissions farm complete with bio-digester and bio-gas for fuel independence as well as power independence. Fr. Godfrey is the proud “papa” of the largest bio-gas facility in Africa. Cheap, easy and clean, bio-gas can heat our water, run our generators, pump our liquids, grind our grains, etc. And we will learn from a master!
But Songhai is much more than just a fuel independent system. Please take a moment when the tape is mounted to watch it and capture the shared dream of this world leader whose Center is a recognized United National Center Excellence in Africa.
After more chat and dinner (outstanding, of course), Tyson, General Bert and I set to working through the immense number of details for our community in Panama, the Santa Clara ARC, with the clear understanding that what we are doing now is highly preliminary since the community will ultimately make these decisions for itself.
That took us late into the night and we fell asleep quite exhausted. Oh, by the way, there was still no internet connection.
Day 4, April 20, 2008
Today was our “BIG DAY” at Songhai Center. Father Godfrey is immensely busy and he agreed to give us most of a full day to discuss our plans and possible working together in considerable detail – that is a large part of why we came.
We began with breakfast at 8 AM in the restaurant which serves about 200 meals per day to visitors. All food served here is grown here or on other Songhai Centers so everything is not only fresh, but free of pesticides and all other types of synthetic, chemical additives. It is wonderful knowing that every bite was grown by the labor of people who love the land and understand how to nurture it so it can nurture them. We are very eager to replicate that loving relationship between our food and our selves as we come to create the farm and farm school which will be a core activity of the Santa Clara ARC.
We took a tour of the facility including the foundry, the kiln, the fields, the food processing areas, the store, the animal sheds, the fish pond, the composing area, the bio gas facility, etc., etc. All of this amazing integrated farming has been created here in the total absence of fertile soil. Fr. Godfrey told us that he had worked 15 years of the 20 that he has been here to create this astonishing fertility. We start in Panama with astonishingly fertile land!
Songhai’s rich productivity daily feeds 1500 people (300 workers and their families, which average 5 people), about 100 students who are in training, typically for 18 months, and the 200 guests who come to the African and Western restaurants. I think it is an easy leap to conclude that our fertile farm will be producing much more than we members of the community, guests and health center clients can consume so it is reasonable to expect that one center of profit for the Santa Clara ARC will be the distribution and sale of outstanding food!
Because of the intense heat, everything stops for several hours during the middle of the day. Everything, that is, except lunch. We wove our way from shade spot to shade spot to the restaurant for lunch and much talk about what we have seen. Tyson is a black smith/iron worker so he was particularly fascinated by learning what he needs to know to make the bio gas apparatus and by the machines which Songhai designs and makes on site.
Later, Fr. Godfrey came to where we are staying, where there is, mercifully, air conditioning and we started to talk together. I asked him how many other groups like ours had come to set up sister facilities as we are doing.
Tyson had the foresight to set up a video camera to film this discussion and it was a great decision. The video is not compatible with my computer so we have to download it to a disc and upload it that way. Clearly we do not have the opportunity here in Songhai, but we will do so shortly.
The upshot of the discussion was that we are what Fr. Godfrey has been waiting for as a partner community! We will bring our experience in order to work toward sister health centers in Parakou, Benin and Santa Clara, Panama. He will use his experience to make Santa Clara a full zero emissions facility farming center and school.
Meanwhile, we had missed our appointment with Col. Mikode, the Codex Contact Point for Benin because we arrived more than a full day late. This delay winds up having significant impact on Codex. Read on.
Dinner, then more intense discussion and off to bed.
Day 5, April 21, 2008
Today we started the day with meeting for about an hour during breakfast with Fr. Godfrey. By the way, Songhai makes its own delicious yogurt. After about an hour, he had other things to do before heading off to Nigeria to meet with government officials there to replicate the Songhai model there. There are also two people from separate projects doing similar things in Nigeria. One is, like Gen. Stubblebine, a General.
Sometime later, Col. Mikode and Pascal, the head of the Benin Horticultural Research Station came to see us. They had good news and bad news for us.
The good news was that they had prepared a budget and program for the agricultural project using magnets to treat the water used to grow plants. Preliminary results suggest significant increases in crop yield, nutrient density, plant vigor and significant decreases in water utilization. Given the rapidly worsening shortage of food in the word due to climate change and diversion of food crop acreage to biofuels (which cost at least 29% more energy than they produce so the bargain is a very, very bad one for the planet, its carbon balance and its people) the ability to increase yield and nutritional value, while eliminating all requirements for pesticides and other chemicals, is a very important asset. Equally important, perhaps, is the reduction in water usage to get stronger and more vigorous plants.
I had been perplexed by the fact that nothing was happening with the agricultural magnet project – nothing. I had designed a simple (and, I hope, elegant) design which would test the hypotheses of increased crop yield, increased nutrient density, increased plant vigor and decreased water usage but they require actually being carried out to show anything. I could not understand it when I got an email saying that the project was postponed until they got the money to carry it out.
When Pascal presented me with the document outlining the costs, I nearly fell off my chair. Instead of 6 test beds, there were 33. Instead of raised beds edged with scrap lumber of corrugated tin or sand bags, they were asking for 4.2 metric tons of concrete, thousands of bricks, etc.
It was clear that we needed to talk!
The next interesting meeting was a telephonic one with Dr. Koura, who was supposed to serve as the Beninese delegate to the Codex Committee On Food Labeling next week in Ottawa. She had informed the Codex Contact Point, Col. Mikode, that she would not be funded by the WHO Trust Fund at 11 PM on Saturday evening but that email was not read until 9 AM Monday morning (yesterday). That means that Benin will not have a voice at this important Codex meeting where the initiative begun by the African nations at the meeting in Ghana in February this year to demand labeling of Genetically Modified Organisms was pushed forward so impressively.
I asked our Natural Solutions Foundation Trustees if we should not host (i.e., pay for) the Beninese delegate to make sure that there was a strong voice from this country at the Codex meeting. We quickly agreed and the next thing we needed to do was convince Dr. Kora and the Beninese government that this was a good idea.
Col. Mikode had no problem with it and said that if Dr. Koura was willing, so was he.
Day 6, April 22, 2008
Early this morning Tyson, General Stubblebine and I set off with a translator to visit Pascal at the Horticultural Research Station to find out what had gone wrong with the Agricultural Magnet project and retrieve 20 pairs for use here at Songhai.
Because we had a translator with us this time, as opposed to the last time we talked with Pascal, we discovered what the problem was: Language difficulties led to Pascal believeing that since we had identified 11 potential crops for the experiment, he would need to conduct the experiment with 3 beds of each crop. The undertaking would be huge and he wanted to build structures to make it possible. I explained that we wanted to choose 2 crops from the 11 and Pascal heaved a huge sigh of relief. We walked out to the fields to see where the projects would take place and Pascal has already applied the magnets to a buried rigid water pipe in preparation for our visit. Once we got the miscommunication out of the way, it became clear that a real project using amaranth and tomatoes would be carried out and carried out well.
We are eager to get those results and the results from the Songhai application. It is our hope that the results are robust enough that we can begin to change agricultural practices in many places in the world. It is essential, the Natural Solutions Foundation believes, to reclaim food production, eliminating pesticides and other dangerous chemicals, and making ti clear that the best crop yield is produced by natural means, not by GM crops. Dr. Koura, on the other hand, when we finally did get together this afternoon, was not so sure it was a good idea. She had “turned off” the process by telling her bosses that she was not, after all, going and was adamantly reluctant to tell them that she could now go under our sponsorship.
We tried every which-a-way to Sunday to persuade her, but she was not movable. We got ready to write to the US and UN Ambassadors from Benin to see if they could provide a person to attend the meetings (it is much easier to get a Canadian visa from the US) when we got a piece of very bad news, indeed.
This information makes us think that we are seeing a pattern: The Ugandan Codex delegate had taken the ball into his own hands and arranged an African strategy session on GM labeling the day before the CCFL meeting was to begin. He is a credentialed delegate from a member nation. Canada denied him a visa twice.
The strategy of the power brokers is clear: fix it so the opposition cannot show up and then claim that the process is legitimate. That is pretty much the same as arresting the opposition and claiming that your election was democratic (or counting the votes on a programmable electronic voting machine with a predetermined outcome, for that matter!)The Codex process is far from legitimate. Our Trustees have just spent an extended period on the phone working out our next strategic moves to deal with this new tactic.
More to follow.
Yours in health and freedom,
Dr. Rima
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org
www.Organics4U.org
What Do the FrankenFood/FrankenCrop/FrankenAnimal Defenders Have to Say for Themselves?
The Natural Solutions Foundation, the leading Global Health Freedom organization, is proud to present this information to you. We protect your right to know about – and to use – natural ways to maintain and regain your health, no matter where in the world you live. Among your freedoms is the right to clean, unadulterated food free of genetic manipulation, pesticides, heavy metals or other contaminants and access to herbs, supplements, frequency devices and other means as therapies that may benefit or to protect your well-being without drugs and other dangerous interventions, if you choose.
For more information on our global programs, including the International Decade of Nutrition, and our US based ones, please visit us at www.HealthFreedomUSA.org and www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org and join the free email list for the Health Freedom eAlerts to keep you in the loop, informed and active defending your right to make your own decisions about your health and wellbeing!
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Feel free to disseminate this information as widely as possible with full attribution.
Yours in health and freedom,
Dr. Rima
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org
www.organics4U.org
Reason Denied
Reason Magazine may be a voice of libertarian politics and economics, but, at least on the issue of Genetically Modified Crops, it has made a serious mistake. Kerry Howley, a Senior Editor at Reason, http://www.reason.com/news/show/125722.html, has somehow forgotten a critical element when writing an ringing apologia full of industry propaganda for the apotheosis, the pinnacle in the triumph of free market over sense or, indeed, reason (and perhaps survival) itself. What he has forgotten is science. Fact, the handmaiden of science, lies trampled in the dust as well. And so does health, yours, mine and the planet’s.
In fact, although unbridled free market economics is the central chord of the libertarian song, the chorus is “As long as your freedom does not hurt me”. And therein lies the rub: Genetically Modified ANYTHING hurts me, and you, and every sufferer of Morgellon’s Disease and every biological function of the earth. But, at least until recently, it certainly has been good business!
But since when is damaging the biosphere not hurting me?
Since when is modifying bacteria which take up residence in our soil and in my gut with potentially lethal long and short term consequences, not harming me?
Since when is creating corn which ensures permanent male sterility and mixing it, unlabeled, into my food, not harming me?
Since when is altering crops to produce so much of a natural pesticide that farmers and their families die from the allergic reaction they experience to breathing the crop’s pollen not harming me?
Since when is introducing “food” into my body, without my consent, which increases allergic reactions, including deadly ones, by 50% not harming me?
Since when is modifying fish so that they are larger, more aggressive and breed earlier in their life cycle so that they will replace native, unmodified fish in the wild, leaving me no choice to eat non GM FrankenFish (because they have been made extinct) not harming me?
Since when is inserting unstable genes into my food which then, undigested by a gut not prepared by long acquaintance to digest them, wander around my body and insert themselves in unpredictable locations in my genes and those of a baby I am carrying if I am pregnant not harming me?
Since when is creating materials which infect and infest me with pseudo life forms bringing a new plague upon the earth, the horrifying and disfiguring Morgellon’s Disease, not harming me?
Since when is creating foods whose wandering genes turn on, or off, my own genes in a totally unpredictable way leading to disruption of the orderly process of genetic control in my body not harming me?
Since when is introducing genetic material which, in the random context of where it happens to land this time in this or that cell, produces proteins never before made inside of any living body (or, perhaps, outside of one, either) without my explicit permission not harming me?
Since when is lowering fetal survival rates though the food the pregnant woman eats during pregnancy, or ate during her own child hood, perhaps, not harming me?
Since when is introducing food into my children’s diet which, in laboratory studies, has been shown to cause damage to the gut, the kidneys, the immune system and the survivability of the young not harming me?
Since when is creating super weeds through genetic drift not harming me?
Since when is creating bugs which, in response to super pesticide production in genetically modified crops, have become resistant to pesticides and capable of new crop devastation without available control not harming me?
Since when is invading farms where non GM crops are growing and destroying their millennia-old genetic material (which I have the enzymatic capacity to digest) not harming me?
Since when is providing food which contains enzymes which confer tolerance for deadly pesticides to a genetically modified plant, but which, in my gut, may transform to produce the same deadly pesticide (a known cause of cancer, infertility and other highly dangerous conditions) they were altered to tolerate not harming me?
Who asked my permission to introduce these things into my body and my world. I would remind Mr. Howley that it is, indeed my world, as well as the world of his commerical free market buddies.
I do not recall signing an informed consent to be a trial subject for the greatest (and possibly most deadly) experiment in human history. Interestingly, I also do not recall signing a contract to allow the degradation and dangerous contamination of 75-80% of every bit of food that I eat with Genetically Modified ingredients. Do you recall signing those documents? So the libertarian chorus, “As long as it does not harm me” seems a little flat in this particular song. Dead flat.
When then-President George H. W. Bush declared that GMOs were equivalent to non GM food and determined public policy, do you recall any safety testing used to guide that decision? Neither do I. When the FDA permits GM foods on the market – that means in your body and mine – without ANY safety testing or a review of the internal safety assessment of the companies that have patented these foods, do they ask us to concur with their decision to allow GMOs in our food which are either under moratorium or banned in a large part of the world, developed or not? But here, in what is alleged to be the most developed nation in the world (with little to back that up in the health and food safety areas!), we are subjected to “foods” and crops and animals which are simultaneously declared to be exactly the same as unmodified foods yet sufficiently unique to patent. And those products of innovation and free market success are, according to the FDA’s website, to be judged in their safety and product liability through the sorting out process of the Court system.
Of course, without traceability there can be no liability. Without labeling there can be no traceability. Thanks for nothing.
So where is the free market, libertarian ethic here? What it comes down to in Mr. Howley’s underlying, structural view is that if you can get away with selling it, not only must that be a good thing to do (“free market”), but hey, “caveat emptor”, let the buyer beware – if they can get away with selling the stuff, they sell it, so it must be good. Of course, the ever-industry-friendly FDA and USDA tie the buyer’s hands and blindfold their eyes by making sure that the consumer has no knowledge whatsoever of what foods do and do not contain GM ingredients. They actually specifically prohibit such labeling because they know full well that consumers will shun the contaminated, altered and potentially very dangerous products which their industry friends have created if they know what they are eating or buying.
Full Free Market Speed ahead and Damn the Facts
GM food crops which have been modified for pesticide tolerance lead to more, not less, pesticide use. Since they are proffered by the maker of the very pesticide they tolerate so well, farmers are encouraged to use more and the free market gets another boost while the food supply, both the consumer’s and the farmer’s health and the environment all take substantial hits.
I attended a meeting in Africa at which Sylvia Matsebo, then Minister of Health of Zambia, was present and we had a chance to talk. I do not know when I have met a more clear sighted and dedicated woman in public life, unless it was the Minister of Health of Kenya, also present at that meeting. When President Levy Mwanawasa of Zambia rejected GM food for his people, as referenced by the article below, I cannot but believe that Ms. Matsebo was at the head of his advisers, telling him what was good for his people, not for his pockets. Would that our advisers and our leaders had the courage and wisdom on this issue of President Mwanawasa!
In 2004, author Robert Paarlberg noted, “Roughly 90 percent of the cotton and soybeans produced in the US are genetically modified. Fifty or 70 percent of the corn is genetically modified. If you look at the products on a retail store shelf, probably 70 percent of them contain some ingredients from genetically modified crops. Mostly corn or soybeans.” Today the situation is worse with more products and more percentages of crops grown in the US and elsewhere modified to the point that the supply of GM ingredients to manufacture organic foods is not in jeopardy. For Natural Solutions Foundation concerns, see above.
Reason rests its comfort level with this technology on the assertion that Mr. Paarlberg makes that there are no studies showing the danger of GM foods. That is as patently false as the statement made to me, personally, in a meeting on June 9, 2005, by Dr. Edward Scarborough, the US Codex Contact Point, that there is simply no literature showing the impact of nutrients on health. I sent him, in response, a bibliography containing references to 10s of thousands of peer reviewed articles and books showing the impact of nutrients on health, a good part of them sponsored by grants, or conducted directly by, the US Government. He never responded, of course. My letter, and that bibliography, were published through our website, www.HealthFreedomUSA.org and the bibliography was referenced in our Citizens Petition to the FDA to compel them to cease their illegal “HARMonization” of US dietary supplements to Codex standards. You can join this legal challenge to US Supplement Codex policy here (http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=184).
Mr. Paarlberg exudes joy over the fact that plants modified to make their own pesticides do so at levels up to 10,000 time the amount made by the organism that manufactures it in nature. It is quite effective at the lower level in nature but at these enormous concentrations not only do insects, both crop pests and beneficial ones, die, but the impact on our bodies when we eat the food from the crops – or wear the clothing made from these fibers – modified in this way, is completely unknown. What is know is that the pollen can cause pneumonia and kill people exposed to it as happened in the Phillipines during cotton pollination time.
What is also missing from this enthusiastic recounting of the wonders of this technology is the 22,000 farmers who have killed themselves in the State of Gujerat (India) in their final grim protest against what this crop has done to them – driven them off the land because they cannot afford to pay the intellectual property tax added to the cost of the seed after they were given the seed free for the first year, destroyed their cultures and devastated their families. Somehow that does not count in the economium of free market thinking.
Happily publishing Mr. Paalberg’s unsubstantiated (and inaccurate) assessment that there is no damage to the environment, in the face of well-documented information to the contrary, and blithly accepting the premise that “gene flow”, aka “contamination” is no different from natural crop cross pollination (which does not require the payment of taxes to the “owner” of the natural gene), and the prohibitions against saving seed because of intellectual property rights which accrue to the owner of the patented genes), Reason has lost its reason.
On the issue of organic farming, things get even weirder. Instead of using vermicluture (adding worms to soil) and returning nutrients and soil organisms (or adding them for the first time) through natural means such as composting (every village produces waste: using it properly returns nutrients to the soil – see the Songhai videos here (http://www.youtube.com/naturalsolutions) – the answer of this industrial agriculturalist and Reason seems to be using synthetic fertilizers which deplete the soil more and more with each growing cycle, leading to green, but non nutritive plants. Both Mr. Howley and Mr. Paarlberg seem to have forgotten, or have never known, that organic agriculture replenishes and enriches the soil as a basic technique of food production, rather than wresting contaminated and demineralized plants from an increasingly devitalized soil. Their intentions may be good, but their information, and hence their conclusions, make no biological sense whatsoever. True, they make free market sense. That’s the problem, as I see it.
However, despite his frustration with the lack of penetration of GMOs in Africa, Mr. Paalberg genially recounts that he sees hope on the horizon “Just last week in Nairobi the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and African Agricultural Technology Foundation announced that they would be going forward with the [GMO] drought-tolerant maize project.” Mr. Paalberg may find hope in that. I find it depressing and frightening in light of the aptly named “Doomsday Vault” in which native seeds are being stored by the hundreds of millions in the frozen wastes of Norway above the arctic circle in the bowels of a hollowed-out mountain. The Doomsday Vault was sponsored, in part, by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the same people who brought nearly universal vaccination to the children of Africa.
If you are a believer in the wonders of vaccination, that is a generous and humanitarian project. If you are familiar, however, with the literature, not just the propaganda, on vaccination and the impact it has on human populations (autism, cancer, immune collapse, heavy metal poisoning, auto immune disease, etc.), then this “generosity” becomes a cause for concern. The concern is, in my mind, equal to the concern on learning that Mr. and Mrs. Gates have chosen yet another way to forward the biological nightmare of genetically modified foods in yet another vulnerable population.
The Natural Solutions Foundation will attend the 2008 Codex Committee on Food Labeling (April, Ottawa) where the African nations will deal, once again, with the US attempt to push unlabeled GM foods on them through both product and seeds. We will be actively engaged in supporting their leadership to prevent this effort from succeeding. In February, at a meeting on this issue in Accra, the African nations created a de facto coalition which elicited the support of Norway, Russia, Japan, the EU and Switzerland. They, unlike the free market folks, understand that governments have a role to play in protecting the health of their people from corporate desires to expand markets.
Please support the efforts of the Natural Solutions Foundation to educate and disseminate information on these crucial issues.
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Demon Seed
How fear of life-saving technology swept through Africa
Kerry Howley | March 28, 2008
In May 2002, in the midst of a severe food shortage in sub-Saharan Africa, the government of Zimbabwe turned away 10,000 tons of corn from the World Food Program (WFP). The WFP then diverted the food to other countries, including Zambia, where 2.5 million people were in need. The Zambian government locked away the corn, banned its distribution, and stopped another shipment on its way to the country. “Simply because my people are hungry,†President Levy Mwanawasa later said, “is no justification to give them poison.â€
The corn came from farms in the United States, where most corn produced—and consumed—comes from seeds that have been engineered to resist some pests, and thus qualifies as genetically modified. Throughout the 90s, genetically modified foods were seen as holding promise for the farmers of Africa, so long as multinationals would invest in developing superior African crops rather than extend the technology only to the rich. When Zambia and Zimbabwe turned away food aid, simmering controversy over the crops themselves brimmed over and seeped into almost every African state. Cast as toxic to humans, destructive to the environment, and part of a corporate plot to immiserate the poor, cutting edge farming technology is most feared where it is most needed. As Robert Paarlberg notes in his new book, Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is Being Kept Out of Africa (Harvard University Press), in 2004 the Sudanese government “took time out from its genocidal suppression of a rebellion in Darfur to issue a memorandum requiring that all food aid brought into the country should be certified as free of any GM ingredients.â€
Starved for Science includes forwards by both Jimmy Carter and Norman Borlaug, the architect of Asia’s Green Revolution and the man credited with saving more human lives than anyone else in history. Paarlberg, a Professor of Political Science at Wellesley and a specialist in agricultural policy, wants the West to help small African farmers obtain promising technologies just as it helped Asia discover biological breakthroughs in the 60s and 70s. Instead, he says, a coalition of European governments and African elites are promoting a Western vision of rustic, low-productivity labor.
reason: Was there a particular experience with African farmers that led you to write this book?
Robert Paarlberg: Partly it was the strong impression made on me by my own visits to rural Africa, working with African organizations, working with USAID, working with International Food Policy Research Institute. I started visiting small farms in Africa 15 years ago. I’d seen a lot of poor farmers in Asia and Latin America but absolutely nothing like this. There was simply no uptake of any modern productivity-enhancing technologies at all in some cases. And I wondered why I hadn’t been aware of this. And then, when I saw more and more narrative in the NGO community and the donor community that was frankly hostile to science, I thought “I have to put this down and write a book for younger people in the donor community who may not remember the importance of technology uptake in Asian agriculture 40 years ago.â€
reason: You suggest that your understanding of modern ideas about food production arises from interactions with your students. What is it that they want?
Paarlberg: My students know just what kind of food system they want: a food system that isn’t based on industrial scale monoculture. They want instead small farms built around nature imitating polycultures. They don’t want chemical use; they certainly don’t want genetic engineering. They want slow food instead of fast food. They’ve got this image of what would be better than what we have now. And what they probably don’t realize is that Africa is an extreme version of that fantasy. If we were producing our own food that way, 60 percent of us would still be farming and would be earning a dollar a day, and a third of us would be malnourished. I’m trying to find some way to honor the rejection that my students have for some aspects of modern farming, but I don’t want them to fantasize about the exact opposite.
reason: Can you give an example of a genetically modified seed or organism, something in use today?
Paarlberg: Bt crops have been engineered to contain a gene from a naturally occurring soil bacterium that expresses a certain protein that cannot be digested by caterpillars. Mammals can digest the protein with absolutely no problem, but caterpillars cannot. When the caterpillars eat the plant, they die.
What’s wonderful about this is that it’s so precisely targeted at the insects eating the plant. The other insects in the field aren’t affected. Using conventional corn instead of Bt corn, you have to spray the whole field and you end up killing a lot of non-targeted species. With this variety, you don’t have to spray.
reason: That sounds less scary than “Genetically Modified Organism.â€
Paarlberg: The book makes the argument that the overregulation of this technology in Europe and the anxieties felt about it in the United States are not so much a reflection of risks, because there aren’t any documented risks from any GM crops on the market. I explain that reaction through the absence of direct benefit. The technology is directly beneficial to only a tiny number of citizens in rich countries—soybean farmers, corn farmers, a few seed companies, patent holders. Consumers don’t get a direct benefit at all, so it doesn’t cost them anything to drive it off the market with regulations. The problem comes when the regulatory systems created in rich countries are then exported to regions like Africa, where two thirds of the people are farmers, and where they would be the direct beneficiaries.
reason: How pervasive are genetically modified foods in the U.S.?
Paarlberg: Roughly 90 percent of the cotton and soybeans produced in the US are genetically modified. Fifty or 70 percent of the corn is genetically modified. If you look at the products on a retail store shelf, probably 70 percent of them contain some ingredients from genetically modified crops. Mostly corn or soybeans.
reason: Are there documented safety risks that merit caution?
Paarlberg: There aren’t any. It’s like the first ten years of aviation without a plane crash.
reason: What about environmental risks? Don’t GM crops affect surrounding plantlife?
Paarlberg: The only impacts they have different from conventional crops are beneficial to the environment. They allow you to control weeds and insects with fewer sprayings of toxic chemicals. And they don’t require as many trips through the field with your diesel tractor, so you burn less fossil fuel. And there is more carbon sequestered because you’re not tilling the soil the way you otherwise would.
There are environmental impacts; there is gene flow. The pollen from a genetically modified maize plant will flow into a neighboring field and will fertilize the crops in that neighboring field. Some of the seeds, as a consequence, will contain the transgene, but that’s no different from pollen from a conventional maize plant flowing into the next field. It’s only if you decide arbitrarily to define gene flow from genetically modified crops as “contamination†and flow from all other crops as natural. Only then does it start to become describable as an adverse effect.
The worst environmental damage ever done by American agricultural was the dustbowl of the 1930s, when we plowed up the southern plains to grow wheat, and all the topsoil blew away. The way we increased production back then was to expand crop area, which was environmentally disastrous. It was a calamity. That was the way we tried to increase production before we had high yielding crops, before we had high yielding wheat varieties, before we had hybrid maize, before we learned to increase the productivity of the land already under cultivation.
reason: Can you give us a sense of what an average African farmer in, say, Zambia, is currently working with?
Paarlberg: It would be a woman and her children primarily, and they would plant not a hybrid maize, but a traditional openly pollinated variety, and they would time the preparation of the soil and planting as best they could for when they thought the rains would come. But the rains might not come in time, or they might be too heavy and wash the seeds out of the ground. It’s a risky endeavor. They can’t afford fertilizer, and it’s too risky to use fertilizer because in a drought the maize would shrivel up and the fertilizer would be wasted. They don’t have any irrigation. As a consequence, even in a good year their yields per hectare will be only about one third as high as in Asian countries, 1/10 as high as in the United States.
reason: Just as it used to be in Asia.
Paarlberg: Everywhere!
reason: Right, everywhere. But Asia has moved on in recent memory. The Green Revolution introduced new biological breakthroughs to Asian agriculture to the point where no one today thinks of South Korea as a rural backwater. Why was Africa not a part of this?
Paarlberg: One reason is that Africa is not easily irrigated. The big irrigated crops like rice aren’t to be found in Africa and the big investments in the Green Revolution went into improving Asian crops like rice. The crops Africans grow weren’t the crops that were being improved during the green revolution.
But I don’t blame it all on the Asia-focus of the original green revolution; we have had plenty of time to invest in scientific research for Africa’s crops, and to make investments in rural public goods like roads or power to make it affordable for African farmers to purchase fertilizer. But African governments have not done that job. In my book I show that typically African governments will spend less than 5 percent of their budget on agriculture even though that’s where two thirds of their citizens work. And if you don’t have larger public sector investments than that, there is just not going to be any uptake in the countryside. But then I go around and show that you can’t blame African governments, entirely, because prosperous donor countries are no longer supporting agriculture in Africa.
reason: No African government other than South Africa’s has made it legal to plant GMOs. You call this “out of character†for the same governments.
Paarlberg: They have not yet enacted the law, set up the biosafety committee, and granted approval, which is the laborious process that [the United Nations Environmental Program] and the European governments have coached them into adopting.
It’s interesting. In no other area are governments in Africa particularly concerned about hypothetical environmental risks. They know better than to invoke the precautionary principle when it comes to unsafe food in open air markets. They know that they need to first get rid of actual food shortages and raise income; then and only then can they afford to impose the same extremely high standards of food safety on open air markets that are imposed on supermarkets in Europe. Yet curiously when it comes to GMOs they adopt the highly precautionary European standard, which makes it impossible to put these products on the market at all. I take that as evidence that this is not an authentic African response, it’s a response imported from Europe.
reason: So the romanticization of bucolic farm landscapes unmarred by scientific advance has an American and European pedigree.
Paarlberg: It’s not what we do at home—only two percent of agricultural products in the US are organically grown. And many of those that are organically grown are grown on industrial scale organic farms in California that don’t bear any resemblance to small bucolic farms. But it’s the image we promote in our new cultural narrative. It’s something that affects the way we give foreign assistance.
reason: Many of the anti-agricultural science gurus you mention in your book have a spiritual dimension. Can you talk a bit about Sylvester Graham?
Paarlberg: Sylvester Graham, the father of the modern graham cracker, was opposed to the modern flour milling industry. He didn’t like the industrialization of bread production, and he wanted women to go back to grinding flour. He was a religious man, a minister, and he had all of the narrow minded prejudices we might associate with a New England clergyman from the 19th century. He thought that women should stay in the home, he believed people should be vegetarians because that would keep their sexual appetite back. We sometimes forget what goes along with the food purist zealotry. It’s often zealotry about more than just a certain kind of food to eat.
In Zambia today there are expatriate Jesuits from the United States who have come to believe genetic engineering is against God’s teaching, though this is not a belief that is embraced by the Vatican. They believe that all living things, including plants, have a right not to have their genetic makeup modified. Of course we have been modifying the genetic makeup of plants ever since we domesticated them 10,000 years ago, but these particular fathers are focused only on genetic engineering.
reason: Isn’t it paternalistic to blame Europeans for the decisions of African governments? Is this something African elites are at least as complicit in?
Paarlberg: It’s a codependency. The African elites depend upon Europe for financial assistance, they depend upon European export markets, they depend on NGOs for technical assistance, it’s just easier for them to follow the European lead than to go against that lead. And to some extent the European governments depend upon having dependents in Africa that will, despite the difficult experience of colonization, continue to imitate and validate and honor European culture and taste.
reason: What exactly have European NGOs done to discourage productivity in farming? You quote Doug Parr, a chemist at Greenpeace, arguing that the de facto organic status of farms in Africa is an opportunity to lock in organic farming, since African farmers have yet to advance beyond that.
Paarlberg: Some of it is well intentioned. The organic farming movement believes this is an appropriate corrective to the chemical intensive farming that they see in Europe. In Europe, where prosperous consumers are willing to pay a premium for organic products, it sometimes makes sense to use a more costly production process. So they think, “Well it’s the wave of the future here in Europe, so it should be the future in Africa as well.â€
So they tell Africans who don’t use enough fertilizer that instead of using more they should go to zero and certify themselves as organic. That’s probably the most damaging influence — discouraging Africans from using enough fertilizer to restore the nutrients they mine out of their soil. They classify African farmers as either certified organic, or de facto organic. Indeed, many are de facto organic. And their goal is not to increase the productivity of the organic farmers, but to certify them as organic.
I just find that to be lacking in moral clarity.
reason: But there are functioning organic farms. If I decide to buy only organic food from Africa, what will I be buying?
Paarlberg: It wouldn’t be grown by small fair-trade-type poor farmers. It would be grown through a vertically integrated, probably European, company that would bring in the machinery, bring in the seeds, bring in the fertilizers, set up a production system that would more nearly resemble a colonial-era plantation than a small independent African farm.
reason: We’ve seen similar resistance to GMOs in India and Brazil, both of which now have legalized the use of genetically modified crops. What happened?
Paarlberg: Farmers were planting them illicitly before the final approval—that’s one reason they were forced into the approval. The technology worked so well that farmers were planting them on their own and you couldn’t criminalize all Brazilian soybean growers so you had to approve them. Similarly in India, Bt cotton spread on its own and performed so well that the government was eventually shamed into approving it.
reason: You aren’t just calling for people to get out of the way. You want increased aid for agricultural research. But why would any of this require aid? If it’s going to prove profitable, shouldn’t the incentive for private investment be there?
Paarlberg: The farmers who need the technology in Africa don’t have enough purchasing power to be of interest to private companies. Or they’re growing crops that aren’t a part of a commercial seed market that would interest private seed companies. The only way to reach them, really, is to consider the crops that they grow, for example tropical white maize or cassava. It’s a little bit like the orphan disease problem. It’s really something that has to be done as a public good by the public sector.
That’s how the green revolution proceeded in India in the 1960s. It was a wonderful success, and it wasn’t really driven by the private sector. It was driven by philanthropic foundations and public investment. Also you need not just seed improvement, but more rural farm-to-market roads, electrification, and things that really governments and only governments are incentivized and capable of doing.
There was a time, before scare stories about technology spread, when the concern was a much more legitimate one: that we’ve handed this technology over to private companies to develop, and they won’t have any incentive to get it to Africa. And to some extent that’s still a legitimate concern. There was never any fear that Brazilian farmers or Canadian farmers wouldn’t be able to get the technology, because they’re big commercial growers. The concern was originally that Africans would want the technology but wouldn’t be able to get it because they didn’t have the purchasing power or the investment climate that could attract private companies.
reason: The book is 200 pages of frustration. Are there any glimmers of hope ahead?
Paarlberg: Just last week in Nairobi the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and African Agricultural Technology Foundation announced that they would be going forward with the drought-tolerant maize project that I describe in chapter 5 of my book. I’m very pleased that the Gates Foundation has seen the opportunity that this new technology provides. It would be too bad if drought tolerant corn were being grown in Iowa in 2010 and not available to the farmer who really needed it in Africa.
Drought in Africa pushes small farmers back into poverty whenever it strikes. They have to sell off all their household possessions to buy the food their families need until the next season. It blocks the escape from poverty that they might otherwise achieve. Anything that puts a safety net under crop yields is going to protect small African farmers from that periodic decapitalization and let them start accumulating assets for a change.
Kerry Howley is a senior editor at reason.
NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET’S DINNER TABLE. THANK YOU, MONSANTO!
The Natural Solutions Foundation, the leading Global Health Freedom organization, is proud to present this information to you. We protect your right to know about – and to use – natural ways to maintain and regain your health, no matter where in the world you live. Among your freedoms is the right to clean, unadulterated food free of genetic manipulation, pesticides, heavy metals or other contaminants and access to herbs, supplements, frequency devices and other means as therapies that may benefit or to protect your well-being without drugs and other dangerous interventions, if you choose.
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Rima E. Laibow, MD
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Nightmare on Elm Street’s Dinner Table. Thank you, Monsanto!
Just in case you thought it was fine to eat Genetically Modified foods (better identified as “FrankenFoods”), along comes a study which makes it clear that you are eating this make believe non-food at your own peril and, worse yet, you are feeding it to your kids at their peril as well. It is important to note that Codex Alimentarius, which sets standards for the international trade of food, permits genetically modified foods and makes no effort to limit, control or eliminate them. In fact, the US has been trying for years to prevent the labeling of GM foods and seed in international trade to emulate its domestic policy which prohibits any label indication that foods contain GM ingredients, as 75-80% of all foods sold in the US do.
Now it appears that the increasingly prevalent nightmare of a disease called “Morgellon’s Disease” may be a result of GM crops and food.
Morgellon’s Disease was first described when a woman’s 3 year old son developed rashes and intensely itchy sores which produced weird multicolor fibers emerging from his skin. She put up a website about the condition in 2001 and named it “Morgellons Disease” after a 17th century report of a similar affliction.
As it always does, the allopathic community of Western, drug-oriented physicians labeled sufferers as delusional. As a physician, I have a great deal of difficulty explaining how a delusion can produce colored fibers which protrude from the skin and continue to grow in a petri dish. Be that as it may, the multicolored fibers produced by the “delusion” have been analyzed and we now know that Morgellon’s Disease is no longer rare, nor is it mysterious any longer. A study of the fibers shows that they contain DNA from both a fungus and a bacterium which are used in the commercial preparation of genetically modified foods and non-food crops (such as cotton). The fibers themselves are primarily cellulose, which the human body cannot breakdown or manufacture. So GM technology apparently has, like Professor Frankenstein, found a way to animate the non living. These fibers twist and twine, grow and divide. In short, living beneath the skin of people, they form parasitic lesions out of what should be non-living material but which, through the horror of genetic modification, has taken on the characteristics of a living thing.
The symptoms are so unbearable that a number of people suffering from the disorder have committed suicide rather than deal with the unbearable pain, constant feeling of something very much like an insect crawling without stop beneath the skin and unbearable itching any longer. Of course, it is possible to speculate that the attitude of most physicians that the condition is a mental aberration rather than a physical one may not have helped these poor souls to cope with their affliction.
How wide spread is Morgellon’s Disease? Some registries have 1200 or more people but these registrants only represent those who have access to the internet and have stumbled across the registry sites. The disease produces material unlike anything most people have ever seen. (http://www.morgellons.org/) and
These pictures show fibers removed from lesions on the skin of Morgellon’s Disease sufferers.
No picture, however, can show you the insects crawling under my skin day and night torment of the victims. Frighteningly, some researchers say that every person they have tested has some level of Morgellon’s type pathology in their skin.
If the hypothesis is accurate and the disease is caused by sowing, growing and eating FrankenFood, that would, however, make sense. 75-80 % of all US food contains unlabeled GM ingredients. We have no enzymes or other mechanisms to digest these unnatural components of the materials which the FDA says are the same as food and prohibits labeling of. We have no way of getting rid of the indigestible, toxic or even lethal materials injected into the nucleus of our food by high energy guns and biochemical tricks that nature never thought of.
Given that the US is allowing the greatest biological experiment in the history of human kind, we should not be skeptical about the possibility that this tragic and terrifying disease may be caused by terrifying make-believe food with all-too-real dangers inserted inside them where they cannot be seen, tasted, or otherwise detected by normal means, only by specialized laboratories.
Part of the objective of the Natural Solutions Foundation is to make sure that 3rd world countries have the labs, and the training necessary to determine what food is clean and safe, and what food is damaged by techniques by Genetic Manipulation.
In the meantime, we will be attending a very important Codex meeting in Ottawa. Either the African Pro-health Coalition will hold its ground in the meeting and continue to defy the US and hold fast to their fervent determination to not allow GM seeds into their coutnries and to require substantial labeling on all foods which contain GM components.
Link Between Morgellon’s Disease and GMOs
by Barbara H. Peterson
Global Research, March 27, 2008
Since the Clinton administration made biotechnology “a strategic priority for U.S. government backing†(1), giant transnational agri-business concerns have aggressively taken over the global food chain by flooding it with Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) without regard for the consequences to the earth or its inhabitants. This takeover not only has the potential for global economic devastation, but threatens the earth’s population with far-reaching health concerns as well. One health concern that seems to coincide with the GMO revolution is Morgellons disease. What if the advent of Morgellons disease has something to do with the ingestion of GMO foods?
Morgellons Disease – What is it?
Very little can be found regarding this disease. Originally, sufferers were told that their problem was imaginary. This was of little comfort to the people who were suffering.
Morgellons Disease sufferers report strange, fiber-like material sticking out of sores or wounds that erupt on the skin. This is accompanied by painful, intense itching, that has been described as “an ever present sensation as if something is crawling under the skin.†(2)
On May 18, 2006, KGW, a local news channel reporting out of the Oregon area published this story:
Strange sickness: Mystery disease horror story (excerpt)
[Dr. Drottar] The disabled family practice doctor felt like bugs were crawling under her skin.
“If I fully tell people what has gone on with me medically, they think they’re in the twilight zone,†said Drottar.
She woke up with the feeling that fluid was flowing just below her skin. Often black or blue hair like fibers protruded from her skin, she said.
“I thought I had been exposed to asbestos. I thought I was having asbestos fibers come out of my skin. I was pulling long, thin, small hair-like fibers that were extremely sharp that could literally pierce through my finger nails,†Drottar said.
In addition to the feeling of bugs and the fibers, Drottar also suffered from severe depression, chronic fatigue and a weakened immune system. As a result, she had to give up her family practice, Drottar said. (3)
Morgellons and GMO – the Link
Little information has been revealed concerning the long-term health effects of GMO crops on humans or animals, and even less information can be had regarding research correlating Morgellons with GMO foods. This is suspicious right off the bat, because it would seem that there would be a natural curiosity regarding a link between Genetically Modified Organisms that people ingest regularly and inorganic fibers that protrude from a person’s skin. This would be right up a geneticist’s alley, and quite worthy of intensive research. So, why aren’t there a ton of published studies? Why is it so difficult finding anything related to this? Could it be that companies such as Monsanto have enough clout to effectively squash these stories? If they have enough clout to ruin countries by deceiving impoverished farmers into purchasing patented GMO seeds, and then take it a step further and force these poor people to purchase seeds year after year instead of harvesting their own, then they have enough clout to ask our more than willing corporate government to manipulate the press…again.
According to Mike Stagman, PhD, “Genetic Engineering is a nightmare technology that has already caused MANY disease epidemics — documented but unpublicized.†(4)
Well Monsanto, you let at least one study slip through. With the help of a couple of search engines, the following article by Whitley Strieber published on October 12, 2007, titled “Skin Disease May Be Linked to GM Food†was found, which concludes that the fibers taken from a Morgellons sufferer contain the same substance that is “used commercially to produce genetically-modified plants.” Here is the article:
Skin Disease May Be Linked to GM Food
12-Oct-2007
Many people—and most physicians—have written off Morgellons disease as either a hoax or hypochondria. But now there is evidence that this mysterious disease may be REAL and related to GENETICALLY MODIFIED food!
The skin of Morgellons victims oozes mysterious strands that have been identified as cellulose (which cannot be manufactured by the human body), and people have the sensation of things crawling beneath their skin. The first known case of Morgellons occurred in 2001, when Mary Leitao created a web site describing the disease, which had infected her young son. She named it Morgellons after a 17th century medical study in France that described the same symptoms.
In the Sept. 15-21 issue of New Scientist magazine, Daniel Elkan describes a patient he calls “Steve Jackson,” who “for years” has “been finding tiny blue, red and black fibers growing in intensely itchy lesions on his skin.” He quotes Jackson as saying, “The fibers are like pliable plastic and can be several millimeters long. Under the skin, some are folded in a zigzag pattern. These can be as fine as spider silk, yet strong enough to distend the skin when you pull them, as if you were pulling on a hair.”
Doctors say that this type of disease could only be caused by a parasite, but anti-parasitic medications do not help. Psychologists insist that this is a new version of the well-known syndrome known as “delusional parasitosis.” While this is a “real” disease, it is not a physically-caused one.
But now there is physical evidence that Morgellons is NOT just psychological. When pharmacologist Randy Wymore offered to study some of these fibers if people sent them to him, he discovered that “fibers from different people looked remarkably similar to each other and yet seem to match no common environmental fibers.”
When they took them to a police forensic team, they said they were not from clothing, carpets or bedding. They have no idea what they are.
Researcher Ahmed Kilani says he was able to break down two fiber samples and extract their DNA. He found that they belonged to a fungus.
An even more provocative finding is that biochemist Vitaly Citovsky discovered that the fibers contain a substance called “Agrobacterium,” which, according to New Scientist, is “used commercially to produce genetically-modified plants.” Could GM plants be “causing a new human disease?” (5)
GMO – Not on My Watch!
The giant transnational corporations behind the GMO revolution are hitting us in our most vulnerable spot – our bellies. Most people have been brought up with an innate trust that what they purchase from the stores is safe to eat. This is no longer true, since most processed foods contain genetically engineered ingredients that can have disastrous effects on both animal and human health. What you purchase from the corner store might just change your DNA and create such frightening symptoms that the general public simply does not believe it. What is worse is that when you go to the doctor to get help, he/she tells you what you are experiencing is all in your head. This is rubbish! It is up to people who care to make the correlations between what we eat and what happens to our bodies. Remember the old saying – “you are what you eat?†Well, this author believes it is true.
Notes
1) Engdahl, F.W. (2007). Seeds of Destruction.
2) Stagman, M. Phd. (2006). GMO Disease Epidemics: Bt-cotton Fiber Disease. Retrieved from http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2006/08/344305.shtml
3) Porter, L. (2006). Strange sickness: Mystery disease horror story. Retrieved from http://www.kgw.com/news-local/stories/kgw_051806_news_sweeps_strange_sickness_morgellons.53b2569a.html
4) Stagman, M. Phd. (2006). GMO Disease Epidemics: Bt-cotton Fiber Disease. Retrieved from http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2006/08/344305.shtml
5) Strieber, W. (2007). Skin Disease Might be Linked to GM Food. Retrieved from
http://www.unknowncountry.com/news/?id=6486
Barbara H. Peterson is a Writer and Activist,
http://spktruth2power.wordpress.com
Unintended GMO Health Risks
The Natural Solutions Foundation, the leading Global Health Freedom organization, is proud to present this information to you. We protect your right to know about – and to use – natural ways to maintain and regain your health, no matter where in the world you live. Among your freedoms is the right to clean, unadulterated food free of genetic manipulation, pesticides, heavy metals or other contaminants and access to herbs, supplements, frequency devices and other means as therapies that may benefit or to protect your well-being without drugs and other dangerous interventions, if you choose.
For more information on our global programs, including the International Decade of Nutrition, and our US based ones, please visit us at www.HealthFreedomUSA.org and www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org and join the free email list for the Health Freedom eAlerts to keep you in the loop, informed and active defending your right to make your own decisions about your health and wellbeing!
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Yours in health and freedom,
Dr. Rima
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org
Do you know where to get organic foods and products? http://www/Organics4U.org
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Codex Alimentarius (the World Food Code) permits GM foods in the international food supply. The United States treats GM and non-GM foods as equivalent and holds that safety and consumer information issues are not relevant matters for Codex to consider since, in the opinion of the US, that body’s mandate is about the international trade of food, not the international trade of safe food.* Many other countries disagree and have created restrictions either forbidding any GM foods in their food supply or requiring labeling before the food can be marketed in their countries. Some countries have declared a moratorium on the importation or growth of GM goods since their dangers – or safety – remain uncharacterized, in other words, a mystery.
Codex allows the use of plants genetically modified to produce increased levels of nutrients even though it acknowledges that such nutrients might not be bio-available, might not be safe and might even be toxic. The report of the Ad Hoc Group on Biotechnology states that laboratory testing is not meaningful in determining the toxicity of these modified plants and their products and therefore reccomends human testing. That testing is being done today: on you. 75-80% of your food contains genetically modified ingredients.
However, good science demands that you know which test animals receive what test substance (or not). In this vast experiment (which you never signed an Informed Consent form for this experiment. In a related post, you will see that the concerns that GM foods might be able to produce new and unexpected diseases is not an idle speculation. In fact, the new (and terrible) entity, Morgellon’s Disease, may well be a result of the widespread dissemination of GM foods and crops.
One of the most significant sources of harmful substances is food – and Genetically Modified (GM) and pesticide laden food heads the top of the list, in my estimation. Their dangers are many, their benefits are few and Jefferey Smith, author of “Seeds of Deception” has compiled an excellent summary of their unintended health risks, presented below.
Simply put, GM foods offer profound and widespread health risks, some of which are known, many of which are not.
Please read the following article and share it widely with anyone interested in their own health or the health of their loved ones. Schools should not serve GM foods or foods with GM components. Neither should hospitals, nor restaurants, nor families. Whether the do is up to you. When you buy organic food, or grow your own clean, chemical free food, when you have healthy, organic food brought to your home through a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community-supported_agriculture) program and when you refused to eat or buy food that is NOT organic, you are creating strong market pressure to make those foods more widely available – and cheaper.
Only one type of food is currently labeled in the US as being GM or not. Produce.
Produce carries a code on the small round sticker affixed to each piece. If the code begins with the number 4, the food has been produced conventionally and carries pesticide residues (which are a significant toxin more dangerous by weight in children). If the code begins with 8, the food is genetically modified and if it begins with 9 the food is organically produced.
Between 75-80% of all foods in the US contain GM ingredients. It is not on the label because the FDA forbids putting that information there. They reason, rightly, that if you know that you are eating GM foods you will not buy that product so the actually forbid manufacturers from telling you what is in their foods!
You can, and should, call the manufacture to ask whether there are GM components in the foods you buy. If there are, explain the hazards and ask to have these substances removed.
The health information below is from the book Genetic Roulette: The Documented Health Risk of Genetically Engineered Foods, by Jeffrey M. Smith, © copyright Institute For Responsible Technology 2008.
The Natural Solutions Foundation is proud to present this information for your use and dissemination. To make sure you get the latest up to date health freedom information, click here (http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=187) to add your name to the Natural Solutions Foundation’s Health Freedom eAlerts.
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Rima E. Laibow, MD
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Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
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Unintended GMO Health Risks
Genetically modified foods: YES, you are already eating them.
NO, they are not safe to eat.
Did you know… since 1996 Americans have been eating genetically modified (GM) ingredients in most processed foods.
Did you know… GM plants, such as soybean, corn, cottonseed, and canola have had foreign genes forced into their DNA. And the inserted genes come from species, such as bacteria and viruses, that have never been in the human food supply.
Did you know… genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are not safe. They have been linked to thousands of toxic and allergenic reactions, thousands of sick, sterile, and dead livestock, and damage to virtually every organ and system studied in lab animals.
Find out what the risks are and start protecting yourself and your family today!
Why isn’t the FDA protecting us?
In 1992, the Food and Drug Administration claimed that they had no information showing that GM foods were substantially different from conventionally grown foods and therefore were safe to eat. But internal memos made public by a lawsuit reveal that their position was staged by political appointees under orders from the White House to promote GMOs. FDA scientists, on the other hand, warned that GMOs can create unpredictable, hard-to-detect side effects, including allergies, toxins, new diseases, and nutritional problems. They urged long term safety studies, but were ignored.[1] The FDA does not require any safety evaluations for GMOs. Instead, biotech companies, who have been found guilty of hiding toxic effects of their chemical products, are now in charge of determining whether their GM foods are safe. (The FDA official in charge of creating this policy was Michael Taylor, Monsanto’s former attorney and later their vice president.)
Although these biotech companies participate in a voluntary consultation process with the FDA, it is a meaningless exercise. The summaries of the superficial research they submit cannot identify most of the health risks of GMOs.[2]
Genetic modification is radically different from natural breeding
In contrast to the statements of biotech advocates, FDA scientists and others affirm that genetic modification is not just an extension of the conventional breeding techniques that have been used by farmers for millennia. Genetic engineering transfers genes across natural species barriers, using imprecise laboratory techniques that bear no resemblance to natural breeding. Furthermore, the technology is based on outdated concepts of how genes and cells work.[3]
Widespread, unpredictable changes
Gene insertion is done either by shooting genes from a “gene gun†into a plate of cells or by using bacteria to invade the cell with foreign DNA. The altered cell is then cloned into a plant. These processes create massive collateral damage, causing mutations in hundreds or thousands of locations throughout the plant’s DNA.[4] Natural genes can be deleted or permanently turned on or off, and hundreds may change their levels of expression.[5]
In addition:
*
The inserted gene is often rearranged;[6]
* It may transfer from the food into our body’s cells or into the DNA of bacteria inside us;[7] and
* The GM protein produced by the gene may have unintended properties or effects.
GM foods on the market
The primary reason companies genetically engineer plants is to make them tolerant to their brand of herbicide. The four major GM plants, soy, corn, canola, and cotton, are designed to survive an otherwise deadly dose of weed killer. These crops have much higher residues of toxic herbicides. About 68% of GM crops are herbicide tolerant.
The second GM trait is a built-in pesticide. A gene from the soil bacterium called Bt (for Bacillus thuringiensis) is inserted into corn and cotton DNA, where it secretes the insect-killing Bt-toxin in every cell. About 19% of GM crops produce their own pesticide. Another 13% produce a pesticide and are herbicide tolerant.
There is also Hawaiian papaya and a small amount of zucchini and yellow crookneck squash, which are engineered to resist a plant virus.
GM staple foods like taro and rice are being introduced around the world in places where they form the core of the diet.
Growing evidence of harm from GMOs
GM soy and allergic reactions
* Soy allergies skyrocketed by 50% in the UK, soon after GM soy was introduced.[8]
* A human subject showed a skin prick allergic-type reaction to GM soy, but not to natural soy.[9]
* The level of one known soy allergen is as much as 7-times higher in cooked GM soy compared to non-GM soy.[10]
* GM soy also contains an unexpected allergen-type protein not found in natural soy.[11]
Bt corn and cotton linked to allergies
The biotech industry claims that Bt-toxin is harmless to humans and mammals because the natural bacteria version has been used as a spray by farmers for years. In reality, hundreds of people exposed to Bt spray had allergic-type symptoms,[12] and mice fed Bt had powerful immune responses[13] and damaged intestines.[14] Moreover, Bt in GM crops is designed to be more toxic than the natural spray and is thousands of times more concentrated.
Hundreds of laborers in India report allergic reactions from handling Bt cotton.[15] Their symptoms are identical to those exposed to Bt spray.[16]
GMOs fail allergy tests
No tests can guarantee that a GMO will not cause allergies. Although the World Health Organization recommends a protein screening protocol,[17] the GM soy, corn, and papaya in our food supply fail those tests— because they have properties of known allergens.[18]
GMOs cause immune reactions to non-GM foods
* If proteins “digest†slowly, there is more time for allergic reactions. Because GM soy reduces digestive enzymes in mice,[19] it may slow protein digestion and promote allergies to many foods.
* Mice not only reacted to Bt -toxin, they had immune responses to formerly harmless compounds.[20]
* Similarly, a mouse test indicated that people eating GM peas could develop allergies both to the peas and to a range of other foods. The peas had already passed all the allergy tests normally used to get GMOs on the market. It took this advanced mouse test, which was never used on the GMOs we eat, to discover that the peas could be deadly.[21]
GMOs and liver problems
* Rats fed GM potatoes had smaller, partially atrophied livers.[22]
* The livers of rats fed GM canola were 12-16% heavier.[23]
* GM soy altered mouse liver cells in ways that suggest a toxic insult.[24] The changes reversed after their diet switched to non-GM soy.[25]
GM soy, reproductive problems, and infant mortality
* More than half the offspring of mother rats fed GM soy died within three weeks.[26]
* Male rats[27] and mice[28] fed GM soy showed changes in their testicles; the mice had altered young sperm cells.
* The DNA of mouse embryos whose parents ate GM soy functioned differently than those whose parents ate non-GM soy.[29]
* Many offspring of female rats fed GM soy were considerably smaller,and more than half died within three weeks (compared
to 10% of the non-GM soy controls). [30]
Bt crops linked to sterility, disease, and death
* When sheep grazed on Bt cotton plants after harvest, within a week 1 in 4 died. Shepherds estimate 10,000 sheep deaths in one region of India.[31]
* Farmers in Europe and Asia say that cows, water buffaloes, chickens, and horses died from eating Bt corn varieties.[32]
* About two dozen US farmers report that Bt corn varieties caused widespread sterility in pigs or cows.[33]
* Filipinos in at least five villages fell sick when a nearby Bt corn variety was pollinating.[34]
The stomach lining of rats fed GM potatoes showed excessive cell growth, a condition that may be a precursor to cancer. Rats also had damaged organs and immune systems.[35]
Functioning GM genes remain inside you
Unlike safety evaluations for drugs, there are no human clinical trials of GM foods. The only published human feeding experiment verified that genetic material inserted into GM soy transfers into the DNA of intestinal bacteria and continues to function.[36] This means that long after we stop eating GM foods, we may still have their GM proteins produced continuously inside us.
* If the antibiotic gene inserted into most GM crops were to transfer, it could create super diseases, resistant to antibiotics.
* If the gene that creates Bt -toxin in GM corn were to transfer, it might turn our intestinal flora into living pesticide factories.
* Animal studies show that DNA in food can travel into organs throughout the body, even into the fetus.[37]
GM food supplement caused deadly epidemic
In the 1980s, a contaminated brand of a food supplement called L-tryptophan killed about 100 Americans and caused sickness and disability in another 5,000-10,000 people. The source of contaminants was almost certainly the genetic engineering process used in its production.[38] The disease took years to find and was almost overlooked. It was only identified because the symptoms were unique, acute, and fast-acting. If all three characteristics were not in place, the deadly GM supplement might never have been identified or removed.
If GM foods on the market are causing common diseases or if their effects appear only after long-term exposure, we may not be able to identify the source of the problem for decades, if at all. There is no monitoring of GMO-related problems and no long-term animal studies. Heavily invested biotech corporations are gambling away the health of our nation for profit.
Help end the genetic engineering of our food supply
When the tipping point of consumer concern about GMOs was achieved in Europe in 1999, within a single week virtually all major food manufacturers committed to remove GM ingredients. The Campaign for Healthier Eating in America is designed to reach a similar tipping point in the US before the end of 2009.
Start buying non-GMO today. That means organic and anything labled “Non GMO” or “Contains No GMO”.
Help us stop the genetic engineering of our food supply.
The health information is from the book Genetic Roulette: The Documented Health Risk of Genetically Engineered Foods, by Jeffrey M. Smith.
© copyright Institute For Responsible Technology 2008. The Institute is a fully tax deductible project of The Coordinating Council, a 501c(3).
[1] See www.biointegrity.org
[2] See Part 2, Jeffrey M. Smith, Genetic Roulette: The Documented Health Risks of Genetically Engineered Foods, Yes! Books, Fairfield, IA 2007
[3] See for example 233-236, chart of disproved assumptions, in Jeffrey M. Smith, Genetic Roulette: The Documented Health Risks of Genetically Engineered Foods, Yes! Books, Fairfield, IA 2007
[4] J. R. Latham, et al., “The Mutational Consequences of Plant Transformation,†The Journal of Biomedicine and Biotechnology 2006, Article ID 25376: 1-7; see also Allison Wilson, et. al., “Transformation-induced mutations in transgenic plants: Analysis and biosafety implications,†Biotechnology and Genetic Engineering Reviews – Vol. 23, December 2006.
[5] Srivastava, et al, “Pharmacogenomics of the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR) and the cystic fibrosis drug CPX using genome microarray analysis,†Mol Med. 5, no. 11(Nov 1999):753–67.
[6] Latham et al, “The Mutational Consequences of Plant Transformation, Journal of Biomedicine and Biotechnology 2006:1-7, article ID 25376, http://www.hindawi.com/journals/JBB/index.html; Draft risk analysis report application A378, Food derived from glyphosate-tolerant sugarbeet line 77 (GTSB77),†ANZFA, March 7, 2001, www.agbios.com/docroot/decdocs/anzfa_gtsb77.pdf; E. Levine et al., “Molecular Characterization of Insect Protected Corn Line MON 810.†Unpublished study submitted to the EPA by Monsanto, EPA MRID No. 436655-01C (1995); Allison Wilson, PhD, Jonathan Latham, PhD, and Ricarda Steinbrecher, PhD, “Genome Scrambling—Myth or Reality? Transformation-Induced Mutations in Transgenic Crop Plants Technical Report—October 2004,†www.econexus.info; C. Collonier, G. Berthier, F. Boyer, M. N. Duplan, S. Fernandez, N. Kebdani, A. Kobilinsky, M. Romanuk, Y. Bertheau, “Characterization of commercial GMO inserts: a source of useful material to study genome fluidity,†Poster presented at ICPMB: International Congress for Plant Molecular Biology (n°VII), Barcelona, 23-28th June 2003. Poster courtesy of Dr. Gilles-Eric Seralini, Président du Conseil Scientifique du CRII-GEN, www.crii-gen.org; also “Transgenic lines proven unstable†by Mae-Wan Ho, ISIS Report, 23 October 2003, www.i-sis.org.uk
[7] Netherwood et al, “Assessing the survival of transgenic plant DNA in the human gastrointestinal tract,†Nature Biotechnology 22 (2004): 2; Chowdhury, et al, “Detection of genetically modified maize DNA fragments in the intestinal contents of pigs fed StarLink CBH351,†Vet Hum Toxicol. 45 , no. 2 (March 2003): 95–6; P. A. Chambers, et al, “The fate of antibiotic resistance marker genes in transgenic plant feed material fed to chickens,†J. Antimic. Chemother. 49 (2000): 161–164; and Paula S. Duggan, et al, “Fate of genetically modified maize DNA in the oral cavity and rumen of sheep,†Br J Nutr. 89, no 2 (Feb.2003): 159–66.
[8] Mark Townsend, “Why soya is a hidden destroyer,†Daily Express, March 12, 1999.
[9] Hye-Yung Yum, Soo-Young Lee, Kyung-Eun Lee, Myung-Hyun Sohn, Kyu-Earn Kim, “Genetically Modified and Wild Soybeans: An immunologic comparison,†Allergy and Asthma Proceedings 26, no. 3 (May–June 2005): 210-216(7).
[10] A. Pusztai and S. Bardocz, “GMO in animal nutrition: potential benefits and risks,†Chapter 17, Biology of Nutrition in Growing Animals, R. Mosenthin, J. Zentek and T. Zebrowska (Eds.) Elsevier, October 2005.
[11] Hye-Yung Yum, Soo-Young Lee, Kyung-Eun Lee, Myung-Hyun Sohn, Kyu-Earn Kim, “Genetically Modified and Wild Soybeans: An immunologic comparison,†Allergy and Asthma Proceedings 26, no. 3 (May–June 2005): 210-216(7).
[12] M. Green, et al., “Public health implications of the microbial pesticide Bacillus thuringiensis: An epidemiological study, Oregon, 1985-86,†Amer. J. Public Health 80, no. 7(1990): 848–852; and M.A. Noble, P.D. Riben, and G. J. Cook, Microbiological and epidemiological surveillance program to monitor the health effects of Foray 48B BTK spray (Vancouver, B.C.: Ministry of Forests, Province of British Columbi, Sep. 30, 1992)
[13] Vazquez et al, “Intragastric and intraperitoneal administration of Cry1Ac protoxin from Bacillus thuringiensis induces systemic and mucosal antibody responses in mice,†1897–1912; Vazquez et al, “Characterization of the mucosal and systemic immune response induced by Cry1Ac protein from Bacillus thuringiensis HD 73 in mice,†Brazilian Journal of Medical and Biological Research 33 (2000): 147–155; and Vazquez et al, “Bacillus thuringiensis Cry1Ac protoxin is a potent systemic and mucosal adjuvant,†Scandanavian Journal of Immunology 49 (1999): 578–584. See also Vazquez-Padron et al., 147 (2000b).
[14] Nagui H. Fares, Adel K. El-Sayed, “Fine Structural Changes in the Ileum of Mice Fed on Endotoxin Treated Potatoes and Transgenic Potatoes,†Natural Toxins 6, no. 6 (1998): 219–233.
[15] See for example “Bt cotton causing allergic reaction in MP; cattle dead,†Bhopal, Nov. 23, 2005, http://news.webindia123.com/news/showdetails.asp?id=170692&cat=Health;
[16] Ashish Gupta et. al., “Impact of Bt Cotton on Farmers’ Health (in Barwani and Dhar District of Madhya Pradesh),†Investigation Report, Oct–Dec 2005; and M. Green, et al., “Public health implications of the microbial pesticide Bacillus thuringiensis: An epidemiological study, Oregon, 1985-86,†Amer. J. Public Health 80, no. 7(1990): 848–852; and M.A. Noble, P.D. Riben, and G. J. Cook, Microbiological and epidemiological surveillance program to monitor the health effects of Foray 48B BTK spray (Vancouver, B.C.: Ministry of Forests, Province of British Columbi, Sep. 30, 1992)
[17] FAO-WHO, “Evaluation of Allergenicity of Genetically Modified Foods. Report of a Joint FAO/WHO Expert Consultation on Allergenicity of Foods Derived from Biotechnology,†Jan. 22–25, 2001; http://www.fao.org/es/ESN/food/pdf/allergygm.pdf
[18] Gendel, “The use of amino acid sequence alignments to assess potential allergenicity of proteins used in genetically modified foods,†Advances in Food and Nutrition Research 42 (1998), 45–62; G. A. Kleter and A. A. C. M. Peijnenburg, “Screening of transgenic proteins expressed in transgenic food crops for the presence of short amino acid sequences indentical to potential, IgE-binding linear epitopes of allergens,†BMC Structural Biology 2 (2002): 8–19; H. P. J. M. Noteborn, “Assessment of the Stability to Digestion and Bioavailability of the LYS Mutant Cry9C Protein from Bacillus thuringiensis serovar tolworthi,†Unpublished study submitted to the EPA by AgrEvo, EPA MRID No. 447343-05 (1998); and H. P. J. M. Noteborn et al, “Safety Assessment of the Bacillus thuringiensis Insecticidal Crystal Protein CRYIA(b) Expressed in Transgenic Tomatoes,†in Genetically modified foods: safety issues, American Chemical Society Symposium Series 605, eds. K.H. Engel et al., (Washington, DC, 1995): 134–47.
[19] M. Malatesta, M. Biggiogera, E. Manuali, M. B. L. Rocchi, B. Baldelli, G. Gazzanelli, “Fine Structural Analyses of Pancreatic Acinar Cell Nuclei from Mice Fed on GM Soybean,†Eur J Histochem 47 (2003): 385–388.
[20] Vazquez et al, “Bacillus thuringiensis Cry1Ac protoxin is a potent systemic and mucosal adjuvant,†Scandanavian Journal of Immunology 49 (1999): 578–584. See also Vazquez-Padron et al., 147 (2000b).
[21] V. E. Prescott, et al, “Transgenic Expression of Bean r-Amylase Inhibitor in Peas Results in Altered Structure and Immunogenicity,†Journal of Agricultural Food Chemistry (2005): 53.
[22] Arpad Pusztai, “Can science give us the tools for recognizing possible health risks of GM food,†Nutrition and Health, 2002, Vol 16 Pp 73-84
[23] Comments to ANZFA about Applications A346, A362 and A363 from the Food Legislation and Regulation Advisory Group (FLRAG) of the Public Health Association of Australia (PHAA) on behalf of the PHAA, “Food produced from glyphosate-tolerant canola line GT73,†http://www.iher.org.au/
[24] M. Malatesta, C. Caporaloni, S. Gavaudan, M. B. Rocchi, S. Serafini, C. Tiberi, G. Gazzanelli, “Ultrastructural Morphometrical and Immunocytochemical Analyses of Hepatocyte Nuclei from Mice Fed on Genetically Modified Soybean,†Cell Struct Funct. 27 (2002): 173–180.
[25] M. Malatesta, C. Tiberi, B. Baldelli, S. Battistelli, E. Manuali, M. Biggiogera, “Reversibility of Hepatocyte Nuclear Modifications in Mice Fed on Genetically Modified Soybean,†Eur J Histochem, 49 (2005): 237-242.
[26] I.V. Ermakova, “Diet with the Soya Modified by Gene EPSPS CP4 Leads to Anxiety and Aggression in Rats,†14th European Congress of Psychiatry. Nice, France, March 4-8, 2006; “Genetically modified soy affects posterity: Results of Russian scientists’ studies,†REGNUM, October 12, 2005; http://www.regnum.ru/english/526651.html; Irina Ermakova, “Genetically modified soy leads to the decrease of weight and high mortality of rat pups of the first generation. Preliminary studies,†Ecosinform 1 (2006): 4–9.
[27] Irina Ermakova, “Experimental Evidence of GMO Hazards,†Presentation at Scientists for a GM Free Europe, EU Parliament, Brussels, June 12, 2007
[28] L. Vecchio et al, “Ultrastructural Analysis of Testes from Mice Fed on Genetically Modified Soybean,†European Journal of Histochemistry 48, no. 4 (Oct–Dec 2004):449–454.
[29] Oliveri et al., “Temporary Depression of Transcription in Mouse Pre-implantion Embryos from Mice Fed on Genetically Modified Soybean,†48th Symposium of the Society for Histochemistry, Lake Maggiore (Italy), September 7–10, 2006.
[30] I.V. Ermakova, “Diet with the Soya Modified by Gene EPSPS CP4 Leads to Anxiety and Aggression in Rats,†14th European Congress of Psychiatry. Nice, France, March 4-8, 2006; “Genetically modified soy affects posterity: Results of Russian scientists’ studies,†REGNUM, October 12, 2005; http://www.regnum.ru/english/526651.html; Irina Ermakova, “Genetically modified soy leads to the decrease of weight and high mortality of rat pups of the first generation. Preliminary studies,†Ecosinform 1 (2006): 4–9.
[31] “Mortality in Sheep Flocks after Grazing on Bt Cotton Fields—Warangal District, Andhra Pradesh†Report of the Preliminary Assessment, April 2006, http://www.gmwatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=6494
[32] Mae-Wan Ho, “GM Ban Long Overdue, Dozens Ill & Five Deaths in the Philippines,†ISIS Press Release, June 2, 2006; and Mae-Wan Ho and Sam Burcher, “Cows Ate GM Maize & Died,†ISIS Press Release, January 13, 2004, http://www.isis.org.uk/CAGMMAD.php
[33] Personal communication with Jerry Rosman and other farmers, 2006; also reported widely in the farm press.
[34] See for example Mae-Wan Ho, “GM Ban Long Overdue, Dozens Ill & Five Deaths in the Philippines,†ISIS Press Release, June 2, 2006; “Study Result Not Final, Proof Bt Corn Harmful to Farmers,†BusinessWorld, 02 Mar 2004; and “Genetically Modified Crops and Illness Linked,†Manila Bulletin, 04 Mar 2004.
[35] Arpad Pusztai, “Can science give us the tools for recognizing possible health risks of GM food,†Nutrition and Health, 2002, Vol 16 Pp 73-84; Stanley W. B. Ewen and Arpad Pusztai, “Effect of diets containing genetically modified potatoes expressing Galanthus nivalis lectin on rat small intestine,†Lancet, 1999 Oct 16; 354 (9187): 1353-4; and Arpad Pusztai, “Facts Behind the GM Pea Controversy: Epigenetics, Transgenic Plants & Risk Assessment,†Proceedings of the Conference, December 1st 2005 (Frankfurtam Main, Germany: Literaturhaus, 2005)
[36] Netherwood et al, “Assessing the survival of transgenic plant DNA in the human gastrointestinal tract,†Nature Biotechnology 22 (2004): 2.
[37] Ricarda A. Steinbrecher and Jonathan R. Latham, “Horizontal gene transfer from GM crops to unrelated organisms,†GM Science Review Meeting of the Royal Society of Edinburgh on “GM Gene Flow: Scale and Consequences for Agriculture and the Environment,†January 27, 2003; Traavik and Heinemann, Genetic Engineering and Omitted Health Research; citing Schubbert, et al, “Ingested foreign (phage M13) DNA survives transiently in the gastrointestinal tract and enters the bloodstream of mice,†Mol Gen Genet. 242, no. 5 (1994): 495–504; Schubbert et al, “Foreign (M13) DNA ingested by mice reaches peripheral leukocytes, spleen, and liver via the intestinal wall mucosa and can be covalently linked to mouse DNA,†Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 94, no. 3 (1997): 961–6; Schubbert et al, “On the fate of orally ingested foreign DNA in mice: chromosomal association and placental transmission to the fetus,†Mol Gen Genet. 259, no. 6 (1998): 569–76; Hohlweg and Doerfler, “On the fate of plants or other foreign genes upon the uptake in food or after intramuscular injection in mice,†Mol Genet Genomics 265 (2001): 225–233; Palka-Santani, et al., “The gastrointestinal tract as the portal of entry for foreign macromolecules: fate of DNA and proteins,†Mol Gen Genomics 270 (2003): 201–215; Einspanier, et al, “The fate of forage plant DNA in farm animals; a collaborative case-study investigating cattle and chicken fed recombinant plant material,†Eur Food Res Technol 212 (2001): 129–134; Klotz, et al, “Degradation and possible carry over of feed DNA monitored in pigs and poultry,†Eur Food Res Technol 214 (2002): 271–275; Forsman, et al, “Uptake of amplifiable fragments of retrotransposon DNA from the human alimentary tract,†Mol Gen Genomics 270 (2003): 362–368; Chen, et al, “Transfection of mEpo gene to intestinal epithelium in vivo mediated by oral delivery of chitosan-DNA nanoparticles,†World Journal of Gastroenterology 10, no 1(2004): 112–116; Phipps, et al, “Detection of transgenic and endogenous plant DNA in rumen fluid, duodenal digesta, milk, blood, and feces of lactating dairy cows,†J Dairy Sci. 86, no. 12(2003): 4070–8.
[38] William E. Crist, Toxic L-tryptophan: Shedding Light on a Mysterious Epidemic, http://www.seedsofdeception.com/Public/L-tryptophan/index.cfm; and Jeffrey M. Smith, Seeds of Deception, Yes! Books, Fairfield, IA 2003, chapter 4, Deadly Epidemic.
Jeffrey M. Smith is the author of publication Genetic Roulette: The Documented Health Risks of Genetically Engineered Foods, which presents 65 risks in easy-to-read two-page spreads. His first book, Seeds of Deception, is the top rated and #1 selling book on GM foods in the world. He is the Executive Director of the Institute for Responsible Technology. www.responsibletechnology.org, which is spearheading the Campaign for Healthier Eating in America. Go to www.seedsofdeception.com to learn more about how to avoid GM foods.
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* As is often the case, the US position is not verified by the underlying international agreement: according to the Codex Statute, the first purpose of Codex is “protecting the health of the consumers and ensuring fair practices in the food trade.†(Codex Statute, Article 1(a))
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