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FDA Needs to Dismiss Former Monsanto Counsel

Saturday, August 22, 2009
Posted in Commentary | Tagged Commentary

The Cancer Prevention Coalition is cautioning Americans that the recent appointment of Michael Taylor as the Senior Food Safety Advisor of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is of major public health concern.

In 1984, then FDA Deputy Commissioner Taylor, former counsel for Monsanto and the leading national biotech umbrella organization, warned dairy producers and retailers against “hormone-free” labels on milk from cows that had not been injected with Monsanto’s biotech milk stimulant, known as recombinant bovine growth hormone, rBGH, to increase milk production.

On the basis of Taylor’s explicit assurances, FDA claimed that such labeling could be “false or misleading,” as there was “no significant difference between milk from treated and untreated cows.”

However, “Taylor’s assurance was blatantly false,” according to Samuel S. Epstein, M.D., who chairs the Cancer Prevention Coalition.

“The hormone rBGH induced toxic effects in cows including mastitis,” Dr. Epstein says. “Also, rBGH milk is significantly different from natural milk chemically, nutritionally, pharmacologically and immunologically.”

Further, says Dr. Epstein, “rBGH milk also is contaminated with pus and antibiotics resulting from mastitis induced by the biotech hormone.”

“However, in spite of such well-documented scientific evidence, the FDA authorized the sale and marketing of GE milk in 1984, while blocking any labeling,” Dr. Epstein says.

He warns that drinking rBGH milk increases consumers’ risk of breast, colon and prostate cancer.

“Of further and major concern, as detailed in my 2006 book What’s In Your Milk?” (Trafford Publishing), drinking rBGH milk had been shown to increase risks of breast cancer in 1984. This evidence was later confirmed by over a dozen other scientific publications,” Dr. Epstein says. “rBGH milk was also subsequently shown to increase risks of prostate and colon cancers.”

Meanwhile, he says, the FDA’s permissive policies on rBGH milk have remained unchanged for over two succeeding decades.

Based on these considerations, it is anticipated that the FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, M.D. will request the resignation of Michael Taylor.

Samuel S. Epstein, M.D. is professor emeritus of Environmental and Occupational Medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health; Chairman of the Cancer Prevention Coalition; and author of over 200 scientific articles and 15 books on cancer, including the groundbreaking The Politics of Cancer (1979), and Toxic Beauty (2009).