1.Safety of food derived from clones + consumer responses
2.Adverse impacts on animal health
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1.Safety of food derived from clones + consumer responses

(Based on the GMWatch Twitter stream
http://twitter.com/GMWatch )

*Very useful study from TestBiotech:
Cloned farm animals - a 'killing application'? (PDF)
http://bit.ly/a8y047

*Seems there are nearly no peer reviewed studies that deal with safety of food derived from clones http://bit.ly/a8y047 p22

*The FDA report which is constantly cited as showing safety, based its conclusion on the safety of "cloned" milk on just 3 studies. All 3 showed some compositional differences with milk from cows not derived from clones: http://bit.ly/a8y047 p22

*The Center for Food Safety after looking at the evidence concluded: Any conclusions regarding safety of food derived from clones and progeny are premature http://bit.ly/a8y047 p23

*The Center for Food Safety also noted that the FDA's assessment of compositional analysis of meat and milk from clones was based on "few studies that analyse small samples".

*A poll by Eurobarometer (2008) showed 58% of European citizens thought cloning for food production could never be justified http://bit.ly/chrBKL

*Eurobarometer (2008) also showed 83% of European citizens said special labeling should be required if food products from the offspring of cloned animals came into shops http://bit.ly/chrBKL

*77% of US consumers "not comfortable" with eating cloned animal products: http://bit.ly/c44XtW

*81% of US consumers believe cloned foods should be labeled: http://bit.ly/c44XtW
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2.Adverse impacts on animal health

(Extracted from the TestBiotech report:
Cloned farm animals - a 'killing application'? (PDF)
http://bit.ly/a8y047 )

Many of the observed adverse health impacts are summarised as Large Offspring Syndrome (LOS)... LOS has been especially observed in clones from species of cattle and sheep. They often go together with late gestation and give rise to an increase in perinatal deaths, excess foetal size, abnormal placental development (including an increased incidence of hydrops), enlarged internal organs, increased susceptibility to disease, sudden death, reluctance to suckle and difficulty in breathing and standing. (EFSA 2008a)

In sheep, cows and mice the following problems were detected (Gjerries & Vatja, 2005):

*Placental abnormalities
*Foetal overgrowth, prolonged gestation
*Stillbirth, hypoxia, respiratory failure and circulatory problems, lack of post-natal vigour
*Increased body temperature at birth
*Malformations in the urogenital tract
*Malformations in liver and brain
*Immune dysfunction, a malformation of related organs
*Bacterial and viral infections

There is a lack of understanding of the underlying mechanisms... observers agree that these effects are mostly relevant for the intrauterine, the perinatal and the neonatal period. But at a later stage in the first three to six months a high incidence of health implications has been observed by many authors. All these effects contribute finally to a low overall rate of success.

This low rate of success is also shown in some of the publications cited by EFSA (2008a) or Gjerries & Vatja (2005):

Panarace et al. (2007): of 3374 embryo clones transferred into surrogate dams, 317 (9 percent) live calves were born, 24 hours after birth 278 of these clones (8 percent) were alive, and 225 (7 percent) were alive at 150 days or more after birth.

Wells et al. (2004): of 988 bovine embryo clones transferred into recipient cows, 133 calves were born and 89 of them survived to weaning at three months of age.

...The FDA (2008) also mentions the immune system as potentially affected by the [cloning] process. The US authority refers for example to investigations by Ogonuki et al. (2002) and Ogura et al. (2002), that show immune disorders and severe respiratory health problems in mice derived from certain donor cells.

So far only very few studies concerning animal health over whole life spans have been published. Remarkably, FDA (2008) even states that in the case of sheep there have been no published reports on the health status of live sheep clones since Dolly.

Since most farm animals are used for the production of meat, it might be a challenge to identify the right scientific approach for investigating their life span and related animal health problems. As FDA (2008) states: "Currently, it is not possible to draw any conclusions regarding the longevity of livestock clones or possible long-term health consequences associated with cloning due to the relatively short time that the technology has existed."