GMO Toxins and Pregnant Women

[thesummerqueen]

Straight from the Skeptalk e-mail list I give you:

The tone of the article makes it sound maybe only a notch above what one would find in "Natural News", but at least there are some non-self-referential footnotes. Any thoughts on the content?

http://wakeup-world.com/2011/08/11/dange.../?mid=5589

But Monsanto and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) swore up and down that it was only insects that would be hurt. The Bt-toxin, they claimed, would be completely destroyed in the human digestive system and not have any impact on all of us trusting corn-eating consumers.

Oops. A study just proved them wrong.

Doctors at Sherbrooke University Hospital in Quebec found the corn’s Bt-toxin in the blood of pregnant women and their babies, as well as in non-pregnant women.(i) (Specifically, the toxin was identified in 93% of 30 pregnant women, 80% of umbilical blood in their babies, and 67% of 39 non-pregnant women.) The study has been accepted for publication in the peer reviewed journal Reproductive Toxicology.

[The Grand Nudger]

It's not beyond possibility that a toxin could be introduced through GM. That being said I gave a casual glance at the article (I'll go down the rabbit hole in a bit) and started out with Bt. Bt is toxic (certainly to some insects, perhaps to human beings, guess we'll have to see). Bt is also the most commonly used pesticide on organic farms, to the tune of tons of product before it is even suspended in water. The difference being that Bt piggy-backing in a suffocant is easier (read: entirely possible) to wash off. Hilariously organic farms have a track record of not properly washing their produce (much more so than conventional farms and mostly due to their avoidance of chemicals which have been shown to be effective for ideological/marketing/compliance reasons), and so Bt residue and a whole host of other things is common. If these studies pan out we'd expect a drastic increase in control and testing, as well as changes to post production handling and the use of these GMO corn varieties.

[thesummerqueen]

Rhythm, a thaisce, when you start in, can you check out the abstract they cite in number "X"? I'd like to see if you come to the same thought as I did.

[The Grand Nudger]

Sure enough. It just occurred to me that if this stuff did pan out and a heavy hand was applied to Bt use organic farming would become a practical (and in some cases actual) impossibility. Wouldn't it be amusing to see the organic movement defending pesticide use?

[thesummerqueen]

[grumbling about organic R-tards]

[The Grand Nudger]

So, reading the abstract...
It appears as though individuals whose digestive systems did not function properly (were not intact) showed a small blip of transgene survival, that did not seem to occur when they were being fed GM Soya. They conclude by mentioning that the transgene did not survive in any subject whose digestive system was functioning properly (intact) and that the experiment suggests that transgene survival occurred at some time other than the feeding experiment. The experiment was tiny...so I don't know how much weight it should have, but it's something.

Let's see how they summarize this in the article-
"In the human study (x), some of the subjects were found to have Roundup Ready gut bacteria! This means that sometime in the past, from eating one or more meals of GM soybeans"

Okay, so they were on the rails until they got to the italicized bit. In this experiment no correlation (let alone causation) was shown between the GM soya and transgene survival, implying that at least in this experiment GM soya is not the cause. This article is starting to look like marketing to me.

[thesummerqueen]

Yup. That's what I thought.

[Autumnlicious]

While both of you can hate on the "Organic" movement, I would like to point out these criticisms of such:

A) We do not have a model of the human body. We do not have one of the brain. Hell, we don't have a model of the thyroid gland (though I know a professor working on such).
B) As the above stands, our knowledge of bioaccumulation and the effects of many toxins in humans is built out of animal models and first hand experience. Unfortunately, the animal models are quite limited in certain aspects (that's known) and first hand experience comes out of something catastrophic.
C) This makes the prospect of adding previously unknown chemicals, toxins into the food supply rather iffy, knowing that only the real 'obvious' issues will rise up, with the non-critical (but possibly long term damaging) ones usually slipping through the next -- that is, until someone publishes a paper on it (hooray science!).

Of course, there is the concern over how Monsanto does it's genetic engineering and their patent practices:
A) Embedding terminator genes without changing the physical or chemical markers inside client plants is madness -- it allows for cross contamination and pollination without controls, adding in an uncontrollable aspect of GMO crops.
B) Monsanto has a history of suing farmers who have crops cross pollinated by Monsanto's crops (and have the legal power to force it through). This paints a history of litigation over responsible engineering.


You may deride the "sky-is-falling" attitude of the ridiculous folk, but there are real concerns about arbitrarily deploying changes to our food supply for the face-value sake of "progress" and the deeper-value sake of "profit", especially from entities whose legal muscle is substantially larger than their engineering brains.

This is from a systems-level approach of error propagation factored in with history of Monsanto.

[thesummerqueen]

My problem with the organics movement is not the sparse science that lies in it, Moros, but the crass and idiotic ideologies that pervade it. The things you mention are all true, but that doesn't excuse the alarmists on the other end of the spectrum.

I don't support GMO's for progress, but for relief, and I consider them only a piece in a larger puzzle of effort that has to go into solving environmental and world hunger problems. I hope you already gave me that benefit of the doubt before you wrote that.

[The Grand Nudger]

The toxin in question is not "previously unknown". It's commonly used in organic agriculture (due to a complete lack of alternatives) though not commonly used in conventional agriculture, where you can simply select a chemical that kills worms and dissipates before post production. Or a chemical which can be safely and definitively handled by a post production procedure. All the while being more effective and efficient, allowing for decreased use. Bt is garbage, I'd still spray Bt GMO corn (and they do).

Monsanto is definitely a piece of work. GMO Ag isn't the sole purvey of Mansanto (nor should it be, if they should even be in business at all).

Changes to our food systems are rarely arbitrary, and organic farmers do not represent any sort of traditional farming methods as the alternative. That's ad copy. There are more pesticides of dubious effectiveness and exotic ingredients that are intoroduced and approved specifically for organics than there are for conventional agriculture. Conventional Ag relies on hard physical science. Organics actually get a pass, because it's an ad campaign, not science. This is the official stance of the USDA on the subject matter, and they wrote the NOP.

Bt, in case anyone is wondering, comes dry in a little foil bag. It's suspended on corn grit most often, and combined with a "sticker" or a "suffocant" (or both) by the applicator as part of some IPM programs, especially those with limitations based upon their contracts with their end consumer. It's used to prevent worms and isn't effective on anything else unless combined with a suffocant or another pesticide as a part of a cocktail. Corn is the big field user, cabbages and leafy plants are the big market vegetable user. The reason Bt corn is all the rage is that it's cheaper to use Bt corn than to buy and apply Bt manually, as it uses less Bt (point of production of seed- ergo price) and no labor (point of production of crop-ergo cost to farmer). This all allows the farmer to bring you the corn (and other producers everything that corn is used in....a massive enterprise in and of itself) at even more absurdly low-ball prices...lol.

To put the whole thing bluntly, squid/bacteria/what-have-you DNA is already in the crops we eat. Always has been. We have no complete model of toxin buildup over time and the effects of the same, but this actually applies to our non-GMO food sources and procedures as well. At the end of the day we have to eat. We have to treat this stuff on a case by case basis. I'm not a big fan of Bt in GMO or manually applied, nothing about it's toxicity (though that would be an issue for me if we had legitimate reason to worry about it specificially, which we don't, as of yet) simply because it's inefficient and unreliable.