By Truman Lewis
ConsumerAffairs.com
January 1, 2007
U.S. and Japanese scientists say they have used genetic engineering to produce cattle that may be biologically incapable of getting bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease.
The animals lack a gene that is crucial to the production of a protein, called a prion, that can cause a fatal version of the disease in humans, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
The National Institutes of Health describes BSE as a rare, degenerative, invariably fatal brain disorder. There have been three known cases of the disease in the U.S., the most recent involving a Saudi-born man living in Virginia.
Consumer organizations for years have pressed for more stringent safeguards to keep the deadly disease out of the U.S. meat supply, with little success.
The biologically engineered animals created by the researchers were not designed to be used as food. They were created for pharmaceutical research but scientists said the creatures could be used for further studies of prions, mysterious infectious agents that contain no genetic material.
"At over 20 months of age, the cattle are clinically, physiologically, histopathologically, immunologically and reproductively normal," the researchers said in a paper published in the online edition of Nature Biotechnology.
The modified cattle "may be a useful model for prion research and could provide industrial bovine products free of prion proteins," they said.
Despite the possible safety advantage of biologically modified cattle, it is likely to be a long time before meat from such cattle appears in supermarket meat departments. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently proclaimed cloned animals safe to eat but will require much more stringent tests before giving similar approval to genetically engineered food.
"This is a seminal research paper," Barbara Glenn, director for animal biotechnology at the Biotechnology Industry Organisation, told the Washington Post. "This shows the application of transgenics to improving livestock production and ultimately food production."
Her organization is a Washington industry group. Its members include Hematech, the company that created the gene-altered cattle.
