Till now, [proponents of] GM crops have maintained that Bt toxin poses no danger to human health as the protein breaks down in the human gut[; its] presence . . . in human blood shows that this does not happen.Author, Sharma, offers a pretty generic quote from two "researchers" (Aziz Aris and Samuel Leblanc) who may be authors of the described study; look out for the Aris, Leblanc, et al., in a forthcoming issue of Reproductive Toxicology.
Scientists from the University of Sherbrooke, Canada, have detected the insecticidal protein, Cry1Ab, circulating in the blood of pregnant [and] non-pregnant women, [as well as] in fetal blood. . . .
The research paper has been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication in the journal Reproductive Toxicology[:] The study covered 30 pregnant women and 39 women who had come for tubectomy at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Sherbrooke in Quebec. None . . . had worked or lived with a spouse working in contact with pesticides. They were all consuming [a] typical Canadian diet that included GM foods such as soybeans, corn and potatoes.
Blood samples were taken before delivery for pregnant women and at tubal ligation for non-pregnant women. Umbilical cord blood sampling was done after birth.
Cry1Ab toxin was detected in 93 per cent and 80 per cent of maternal and fetal blood samples, respectively[,] and in 69 per cent of tested blood samples from non-pregnant women. . . .
The author then goes on to quote, apparently, himself (by last name: "Sharma said"), calling on Indian regulators immediately to study the breadth of Bt toxin contamination and risk of long term health impacts, again, pretty generically. (Apparently he's a real journalist: http://www.dinesh.net.in/)
... and I imagine that India might have regulators capable of such work, in India, even if one of its journalists may behave with a dash more earnest op-ed idiosyncrasy than one may anticipate, while we here in the land of the proponents lack any such regulator.
If you were surprised when the banks and scurrilous financial institutions were too big to fail (and had forgotten how some captains of American industry who were accustomed to doing business with and within Germany enjoyed exceptional leverage with the government toward the end of "the great depression"), then you'll probably be surprised again when the time comes that we all agree that the great agrichemical machine that is American industrial monoculture food-substitute production (and that industry's many support-industries) has to be reigned-in, and those agencies charged with oversight of the involved spheres of regulatory (and commercial, and agricultural, and toxic, and so on) and regulated activity -- principally, the EPA, the FDA and USDA, who, in fact, conspired with OSTP and the industry itself to create the "coordinated framework" of their own abdication of that responsibility (in favor of . . . "voluntary self regulation") with respect to biotechnology back in 1986 -- will find that they, and their abdicated, unfunded, moth-eaten and doubt-riddled mandates are too weak and puny to bring the cabal behind the endless supply of Doritos to heel.
I think I might have more to say on that regulatory abdication, at another time. I meant just now to post the story, then a) wanted it to be right, and then, b) wondered what might mean and if I really did want it, and c) got to ranting. Ranting is fun.