Children’s Cold Medicine, Cloned Meat, and The FDA: Some Thoughts.

The FDA has been in the news a lot recently, most notably to declare the sale of meat from clones or the offspring of clones safe and legal, and to declare infant cold medicine unsafe for infants. I have alot of somewhat scattered thoughts on these two matters, and the FDA in general, so bear with me as I attempt coherency.

Firstly, the children’s/infant cold medicine/pain reliever issue. Paracetamol, the active ingredient in pain relievers has been available in a children’s formulation sine the late 1950’s . I wasn’t able to find out for how long it’s been available/marketed in an “infant” formulation, but it has been for a number of years in a myriad of different products for infants as young as 12 weeks old. The toxicity and dangers of overdose of paracetamol/acetaminophen have been well known and documented for nearly a century, while many drugs we use are toxic at higher doses the FDA is only just discovering that this particular drug may be unsuitable for infants and children now? They have issued an official warning not to give cold medicine or pain reliever to children under two, and are currently “considering” the safety of these products for older children.

I don’t know about you but between this, the Vioxx fiasco, and many other similiar situations where the FDA has given a drug the okie-dokie and then, sometimes decades later, retracted approval, I’m starting to think twice before I take any medicine, especially over-the-counter, no matter how bad that headache is! By the way, when I went to the FDA’s website to find out more, this information was conspicuously absent from their pages, despite it being splashed all over CNN and other major new outlets this morning. When I did a search on children’s tylenol within their site, I came up only with a warning from several years ago saying not to give the infant formula to older children because that formulation is much more concentrated (apparently several children died when their parents subbed a younger sib’s medicine for theirs - the tragic part is that the symptoms of overdose mimic the symptoms of a bad cold or flu, prompting parents to keep medicating)

What there was not a shortage of information on, however, was the approval for cloned animals to be put on the market. It was one of the first things I saw on the front page, and there was a link to a whole storehouse of information on cloning, cloning approval, and cloned food safety. Some would say a disproportionate amount considering how few cloned animals actually are or going to be on the market anytime soon (compared to, say, the number of people who give their infants cold medicine when they have the sniffles).

Now, I am definitely not a proponent of cloning animals for anything, especially food. And even though we’ve been effectively cloning plants for thousands of years, I’m not a fan of that either. To me anything that decreases the genetic diversity of our food source is bad news. All that aside, I do feel the hubbub and the endless polls about “Will you eat cloned meat?” are a bit of an overreaction. While I couldn’t find any figures for how much cloned meat is or is going to be on the market, my guess is that it will be virtually none.

It’s a numbers game, people. How much does it cost to clone a cow? A lot. How much does it cost it to get some semen from a great bull and inseminate a cow? Very little. It will almost certainly never be cheaper to clone an animal than to make it the old-fashioned way. What we will see, and probably are seeing already, is the meat from the offspring of cloned animals. A prize angus bull, try as he might, only makes so much semen in his life. But clone him, and even if his clone only lives half as long you still are probably making a big profit.

Now, I don’t think cloned meat is going to turn out to be acutely toxic or anything like that. But the honest truth is, clones do not live as long as their genetic progenetors, and they have a higher rate of sickness and organ failure. Whether this effects the offspring of clones or not seems to be undetermined - my guess is yes. By adding the offspring of clones into our food supply we are simulatainously decreasing the quality and diversity of our meat. And by allowing this meat to go to market without long-term studies and without any labelling system to allow the customer to make an informed decision, the FDA is being highly irresponsible.

Basically, all this goes to highlight the ineffectiveness, duplicity, and secretiveness of the agency responsible for the safety of pretty much everything we put in our body. I try not be a conspiracy freak, but honestly at this point I’m pretty much becoming one. It seems that you can’t trust any food you didn’t grow or raise yourself, and not even some of that depending on where you got the seeds/seedlings/baby animal. As for medicine, well…let’s just says if the disease isn’t life threatening, the cure may be worse than the illness. In any case, we obviously can’t leave it up to other people to tell us whether something is safe or not. It pays to do our homework.

~ by lycaon on January 17, 2008.