[TheForge] OT: GM foods OT:

[peter fels]

On May 26, 2011, at 5:18 PM, CGRAF wrote:

> On 5/26/2011 2:24 PM, peter fels wrote:
>> Stop and think a sec Mike and Andy
>> ...Food and Drug is under enormous public pressure.
>> To get a GM food passed for general use, the testing is VERY extensive,
>> subject to scientific and public scrutiny and the hard eyes of industry liability lawyers.
>> The testing starts in vitro..then goes through animal testing..rats through monkeys...
>> Then to slowly increasing numbers of people. It takes years and a whole lot of money.
>> By the time a product gets to the public, it has been tested as extensively as they know how.
>> Go look up the testing protocol before you say " continents at a time" .
>> 
> 
> 
> I am not faulting the testing at all. The stuff is probably fine.

Probably not...surely a mixed bag.

> I am also aware of things like R22 that passed muster originally on 
> safety specs, it was not poisonous like the ammonia  it replaced nor 
> explosive like the propane it replaced. It only took 50 or so YEARS for 
> us to figure out that just maybe it was screwing with the ozone.

It's a game of learn as you go and hope the unscreened mistakes aren't catastrophic.
Will ozone depletion cause more deaths than propane and ammonia in that time span?
> 
> How about thalidomide or my own personal favorite DES?

Thalidimide and it's modifications are now critical medications for select diseases.
The kind of cancer i had was associated with DES.
Mixed bags. Overall to our advantage.

> Aspirin was bad for you, or at least for kids and was replaced with 
> acetaminophen, which supposedly now has problems.

It's said that aspirin would never make it past the FDA today.
Risk/reward ratios need to be considered out front.
The general public doesn't do that.
> 
> They used to give pure O2 to "blue babies" until thirty and forty year 
> old people started going blind from it.

How many of them would have died?
> 
> It just takes a while to find out about this type of thing. Problems 
> only show up after years, maybe decades and with a data set far 
> exceeding anything the FDA can have in its testing phase.

Agreed...but only sometimes and not all that often.
> 
>  My gripe is with the extent that the GMO type food will replace a 
> naturally diverse seed supply.
> One fungus or other plant disease and the potato famine will look like a 
> cake walk. Remember when cities planted forests of Dutch Elm trees along 
> the streets.( Milwaukee lost thousands of them in about three years.) 

The problem here is monoculture, not the GM plants themselves, and much easier to solve.

> They don't any more. Here it is about five lots before a species repeats.
> 
> My feelings about homogenizing the food supply is governed by the same 
> thing as my dislike of overlarge and powerful government.
> One mistake or misfortune by or to either effects a lot more people a 
> lot worse than 5 or 6 hundred million small but differing mistakes are 
> likely to.
> 
> Diversity in almost all cases is a safer and probably more productive 
> course in the long run.

Yessir!
> 
> Mike Graf
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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