Monday, October 29, 2012

Giant Ants are coming! It ain't just plain ol' salmon!

Remember those "B" movies of the 50's and 60's?  Giant ants, Godzilla, huge scorpions and other tiny beasts of nature growing to enormous proportions because of the scare of nuclear fallout.  Well, it made fun movies and TV, but the only lasting effects of fallout has been increased cancer rates.  In the case of residents of Minsk north of Chernobyl, 60% of births have birth defects.  But no giant ants.  Not yet, but these times, they are a changin' as the old song says.  A new and horrific threat to Americans is now on the horizon.  Genetically Engineered Salmon.  Salmon farmers want to desparately introduce these to the unsuspecting consumers.  And they want to sell them without specific labeling that states that they just plain salmon.  Nothing about genetically modified.
The salmon in question are engineered by inserting a gene that produces growth hormone in large enough quantity that the fish grows to a mature saleable size in one year instead of three, the normal time frame for farmed salmon.  I don't think that I am the only one out in the real world that sees the problem with this.  The National Academy of Sciences is against allowing anyone to make these fish.
Problems that are pretty evident:
  1. Farmed fish regularly escape containment and then breed with native populations.
  2. NO RESEARCH has been done on the long term effects of what eating GE salmon does.
  3. Developers state all fish are triploidal (sterile females) but have done no research to determine if this man made genetic variation holds throughout life cycle of fish over one year if a fish "accidently" gets released into natural environment.
  4. Using only 6 (SIX) fish to test allergenicity of this mutated fish is NOT adequate testing.
  5. AquaBounty Inc, states in their application for approval to the FDA that the gene spliced into the fish did not alter over successive generations.  Hmm, see item 3 above.
Some of the stuff that I read makes me think back to those old giant creature movies.  Let's be realistic, no long term research has been done.  Just like all the other GM foods, they didn't do any long term testing and now we have sound evidence that the BT toxin gene, and the gene to allow plants to survive mega doses of glosophates transfers to the intestinal bacteria in humans.  How do we know that if we as humans eat this salmon, will the growth hormone gene also insert itself into the bacterial flora in our intestines.  If it does, will the bacteria then begin to excrete growth hormone into our systems.  And what about the fish that escape into the natural environment?  Will they indeed become the prevalent species in the wild?  And what about creatures that feed on salmon, will they, just like humans, begin to grow uncontrollably?  Will we have giant bears in the wild, giant sharks, giant ants?

One of the scary things about all of this controversy over Genetically Engineered food items is what happens if people like me are proved to be correct.  What happens when we find that BT toxins building up in our systems causes cancer, heart disease, birth defects or whatever?  What happens if humans start to grow uncontrollably because they eat a lot of GE salmon?  If all this becomes provable, does Monsanto, AquaBounty and other gene technology companies have the resources to handle trillions of dollars in lawsuits filed against them.  But then again, since the heads of Monsanto, along with Obama himself, only eat organic food and not their own poison, then perhaps they believe they will be the only ones left to repopulate the planet after killing off all the riff raff.

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