Henry I. Miller, a doctor and fellow at the Hoover Institution, wrote an article for the New York Times titled “Don’t Cry Over rBST Milk.” Miller headed the Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Biotechnology from 1989 to 1993 and is the co-author of “The Frankenfood Myth.” He offered a balanced and informative view on the use of rbST in dairy cows. What do you think?
Bad-faith efforts by biotechnology opponents to portray rbST as untested or harmful, and to discourage its use, keep society from taking full advantage of a safe and useful product. The opponents’ limited success is keeping the price of milk unnecessarily high. Comprehensive studies by academics and government regulatory agencies around the world have found no differences in the composition of milk or meat from rbST-supplemented cows.
And consumers are apparently happy to drink milk from supplemented cows, in spite of efforts by biotechnology opponents to bamboozle milk processors and retailers into believing that consumers don’t want it. In various surveys to ascertain the factors that influence consumers’ milk purchasing decisions, the predominant considerations have been: price (80 percent to 99 percent), freshness (60 percent to 97 percent), brand loyalty (30 percent to 60 percent) and a claim of “organic” (1 percent to 4 percent). Only the “organic” claim is even remotely related to rbST supplementation. Unless prompted, the consumers surveyed didn’t mention rbST as a concern.
Activists’ purely speculative concerns about rbST — ranging from the destruction of small family farms to the risk of cancer — have proven baseless. Before approval by the Food and Drug Administration, rbST underwent the longest and most comprehensive regulatory review of any veterinary product in history. Three years before the F.D.A. approved the marketing of milk from supplemented cows, its scientists, in an article published in the journal Science, summarized more than 120 studies showing that rbST poses no risk to human health.
Their conclusion was affirmed over the next several years by additional scientific reviews conducted by the National Institutes of Health, the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the drug-regulatory agencies of Britain, Canada and the European Union, and by an issues audit done by the Department of Health and Human Services inspector general. These reviews noted that traces of bST are found in milk from all cows, supplemented or not. They also pointed out that, like other proteins, rbST is digested in the human gut. Moreover, even if it is injected into the human bloodstream, it has no biological activity.
Largely as a result of bullying by several members of Congress, the F.D.A.’s review of rbST took nine years, while the evaluation of an almost identical product for injection into growth hormone-deficient children had taken a mere 18 months. Cynical activists have unfairly stigmatized a scientifically proven product that has consistently delivered economic and environmental benefits to dairy farmers and consumers.