New study questions safety of GMOs for human and animal health
Oral question to be put to the Commssion
A new scientific paper, published in the peer reviewed Food and Chemical Toxicology journal ”Long term toxicity of a Roundup herbicide and a Roundup-tolerant genetically modified maize”, by Séralini et al. details a number of disturbing health findings that show how entirely inadequate industry testing of GMOs is.
The results are extremely worrying: increased mortality in all groups of rats submitted to the GMO and / or herbicide, increase in occurrence of kidney and liver disease and development of large tumors, particularly in females... And these effects seem to appear at the end of four months, which completely invalidates the safety findings from experiments made by manufacturers for periods up to only three months whereas this study is the first one ever made on two years.
There are 2 GMOs that are allowed to be grown in Europe (GMO maize MON810, Amflora GMO potatoes) and more than 40 GMOs allowed for imports and use as food or feed, including NK603 (the one in the study) and 7 with NK603 gene.
What is the Commission going to do to take the results of this study into account for defining the risk assessment of GMOs? Is the Commission going to recognize that a mandatory 3 month feeding study is not sufficient to monitor possible long term effects?
What urgent measures is the Commission going to take to prevent animals and consumers to ingest GMOs until new safety measures are in place?
On a longer term, how is the Commission going to insure the responsible agencies in charge of assessing the safety of GMOs are truly independent from the biotech industry that has already launched a concerted attack on this publication, as it has systematically done for every study that questions the safety of GMOs?
