GM foods were first developed in the USA, where no health tests were carried out on humans prior to the release of GM foods onto the US market. The justification for this was an assumption made by the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) that GM foods were no different to conventional foods and therefore did not need to be tested on humans. The biotech industry often claims that animal feeding trials have been carried out to test GM foods. Only ten animal feeding studies on the health effects of GM foods have been published, two of those studies were conducted by independent scientists and eight were conducted by the biotech companies or bodies using industry supplied data. A Norwegian study examined all ten feeding studies and concluded that “much more scientific effort and investigation is necessary before we can be satisfied that eating foods containing GM material in the long term is not likely to provoke any form of health concerns.” (See: UK Studies Reveal Health Problems With GM Food.)

Subsequent to the introduction of GM food in America, The United States Center for Disease Control, records that food related illnesses in America have doubled - and notes that in spite of this, no epidemiological studies have been carried out to discover if GM food is linked to these increases.

Similar instances of increased health problems as potentially related to the introduction of GM food have occurred in the UK and in Russia. Allergies, particularly in children, to soya products skyrocketed to 50% soon after Monsanto´s GM soya was imported into the UK, but no follow-up studies were conducted to confirm a link.  In Russia, at a press conference held on December 11th 2003 a group of scientists announced that the number of people with symptoms of allergies increased by three times within three years, and suggested that increased consumption of GM goods by the population might be the cause.

 

The biotech industry often quotes the American Medical Association (AMA) as saying that “there are no registered cases of illnesses that can be traced to consumption of GM foods”.  The reason the AMA can claim this is because no tests have been carried out to discover if the consumption of GM food effects human health.  What is more, testing on the American population would be almost impossible because GM food in America is not labelled – if people fall ill they cannot know they have eaten GM food and therefore cannot relate health problems to the consumption of GM-food.

The biotechnology industry claims that Americans have been eating GM food for years with no health problems. This is an unjustifiable assertion given that it rests on the assumption that the ill effects of eating GM food will manifest themselves immediately and in overtly obvious ways – in other words, that vast parts of the population will fall ill with dramatic and similar ailments.  It is far more likely that adverse effects from eating GM food will be subtle, difficult to identify, and only become apparent over time.