Researcher Warns of Cancer Risk From rBGH (non-organic) Dairy Foods
Sunday March 15, 8:00 am Eastern Time: SOURCE: Cancer Prevention Coalition
Monsanto's Hormonal Milk Poses Risks of Prostate Cancer, Besides Other Cancers, Warns Professor of Environmental Medicine at the University of Illinois School of Public Health.
CHICAGO, March 15 /PRNewswire/ -- The following was released today by Samuel S. Epstein, M.D., Professor Environmental Medicine, University of Illinois Chicago, School of Public Health:
As reported in a January 23, 1998 article in Science, men with high blood levels of the naturally occurring hormone insulin-like growth factor (IGF-1) are over four times more likely to develop full-blown prostate cancer than are men with lower levels. The report emphasized that high IGF-1 blood levels are the strongest known risk factor for prostate cancer, only exceeding that of a family history, and that reducing IGF-1 levels is likely to prevent this cancer. It was further noted that IGF-1 markedly stimulates the division and proliferation of normal and cancerous prostate cells and that it blocks the programmed self-destruction of cancer cells thus enhancing the growth and invasiveness of latent prostate cancer. These findings are highly relevant to any efforts to prevent prostate cancer, whose rates have escalated by 180% since 1950, which is now the commonest cancer in non-smoking men with an estimated 185,000 new cases and 39,000 deaths in 1998.
While warning that increasing IGF-1 blood levels by treating the elderly with growth hormone (GH) to slow aging may increase risks of prostate cancer, the 1998 report appears unaware of the fact that the entire U.S. population is now exposed to high levels of IGF-1 in dairy products. In February 1995, the Food and Drug Administration approved the sale of unlabelled milk from cows injected with Monsanto's genetically engineered bovine growth hormone, rBGH, to increase milk production. As detailed in a January 1996 report in the International Journal of Health Services, rBGH milk differs from natural milk chemically, nutritionally, pharmacologically and immunologically, besides being contaminated with pus and antibiotics resulting from mastitis induced by the biotech hormone. Most critically, rBGH milk is supercharged with high levels of abnormally potent IGF-1, up to 10 times the levels in natural milk and over 10 times more potent. IGF-1 resists pasteurization and digestion by stomach enzymes and is well absorbed across the intestinal wall. Still unpublished Monsanto tests, disclosed by FDA in summary form in 1990, showed that statistically significant growth stimulating effects were induced in organs of adult rats by feeding IGF-1 at the lowest dose levels for only two weeks. Drinking rBGH milk would thus be expected to increase blood IGF-1 levels and to increase risks of developing prostate cancer and promoting its invasiveness. Apart from prostate cancer, multiple lines of evidence have also incriminated the role of IGF-1 as risk factors for breast, colon, and childhood cancers.
Faced with escalating rates of prostate and other avoidable cancers, FDA should withdraw its approval of rBGH milk, whose sale benefits only Monsanto while posing major public health risks for the entire U.S. population. Failing early FDA action, consumers should demand explicit labeling and only buy rBGH-free milk.
ANTIBIOTICS AND 'SUPERBUGS' – STRAIGHT FROM FARM TO TABLE 16 AUGUST 2002 The University of Sydney News - Volume 34 No 13
Trade pressures will force the Australian agricultural industry to abandon practices which promote "superbugs" – diseases resistant to antibiotics, according to Associate Professor Peter Collignon from the Department of Infectious Diseases at the University of Sydney's Canberra Clinical School.
Delivering a Faculty of Medicine Dean's lecture last week, Dr Collignon traced a range of evidence linking the use of antibiotics in animals to the increasing resistance humans are showing to antibiotics. He argued that much of this use had minimal, if any, benefits for animals, and was indefensible in the light of the importance of antibiotics for fighting disease in humans.
While acknowledging that resistance has been a problem since antibiotics were first used, and saying that medical practitioners had a duty to minimise their use, Dr Collignon said there was no doubt that resistant bacteria can come across the food chain. The continuous in-feed use of antibiotics began in agriculture in the early 1950s, especially in the pig, poultry, cattle and aquaculture industries. And since resistance is proportional to use, overuse of antibiotics in animals, especially as growth promoters, poses unnecessary dangers to human health via the food chain.
Antibiotic resistance is an increasing problem around the world, and is exacerbated by international travel. Already, treatment is very difficult – and sometimes impossible – for people with infections caused by acinetobacter, Staph aureus, pneumococcus, E coli, and enterococcus. "While most of these resistant bacteria are human in origin, a number of them such as enterococcus, E. coli and salmonella, can be spread via the food chain," Dr Collignon said.
A 1978 University of Sydney honours graduate in Medicine and Medical Science, Dr Collignon has been active in his field for more than 18 years. He recently spent four months as a consultant to the World Health Organisation, developing global guidelines for the use of antibiotics in agriculture.
In his lecture, Dr Collignon raised and refuted a number of arguments used by agriculturalists and drug suppliers to defend the practice of feeding antibiotics to animals. Arguments that antibiotics increase body weight in animals while lowering the amount of food they consume topple when relative costs are taken into account, as even the most favourable data translates to gains of only 1 or 2 cents per chicken, "at the expense of large numbers of 'superbugs' in our food".
Nor was it feasible to argue that continuous use of antibiotics as growth promoters in agriculture helped fight malnutrition in developing countries, as such meat could not be delivered to those in need because of lack of infrastructure.
"Using continuous antibiotics as animal growth promoters does nothing to remedy these nutritional problems but instead increases the risk that everyone living there will be exposed to more antibiotic resistant bacteria," he said.
In addition, the use of antibiotics to prevent disease in animals is not very effective unless animals are malnourished, crowded and under stressful conditions. "I actually believe there are no or minimal benefits of using antibiotics as growth promoters in a country like Australia," Dr Collignon said.
Of particular concern is the rise of the "superbug" known as VRE, vancomycin resistant enterococcus, which is extremely difficult and costly to treat.
Dr Collignon also opposes the use in animals of "last line" antibiotics such as fluoroquinolones. "If resistance to them develops there may be no other antibiotics available to treat serious infections in people," he said.
With "the mentality towards continuous use of antibiotics in animals changing markedly in Europe in recent years" and restrictions occurring in some countries without affecting production, "the major trading blocks of the US and the EU appear to be moving and legislating the right way".
"I'd like to think we could be ahead of them. Australia has the best environment to be relatively 'antibiotic free' and thus have the safest products for consumers. "I personally think we can do this without causing great harm to our industry economically and I think it will put our industry in a better trade position. If we don't do it sooner rather than later, we will not only have a health problem but a trade problem
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