ACTION ALERT: Tell Congress to Label Meat and Milk from Cloned Animals

Animal cloning is a new technology with potentially severe risks for food safety. Defects in clones are common, and cloning scientists warn that even small imbalances in clones could lead to hidden food safety problems in clones' milk or meat. There are few studies on the risks of food from clones, and no long-term food safety studies have been done.

Further, the pregnancy complications in cloning cause unnecessary suffering for host mothers, and clones commonly develop with severe deformities and health problems, such as grossly oversized calves, enlarged tongues, squashed faces, intestinal blockages, immune deficiencies, diabetes, high rates of heart and lung damage, kidney failure and brain abnormalities.

Opinion polls show that the majority of Americans do not want food from animal clones and are opposed to cloning on moral or ethical grounds.

Citizens for Health supports efforts by the Center for Food Safety (CFS) urging the FDA to ban the use of clones in food production until the food safety and animal cruelty problems in cloning have been resolved, and until public discussions have addressed the troubling ethical issues that cloning brings.

The National Organic Standards Board (NOSB), an expert advisory panel to the USDA’s National Organic Program, has made it clear that organic agriculture should not allow the use of cloned animals or their offspring in the production of organic food. The NOSB voted at their spring meeting in Washington, DC to exclude cloned animals, their offspring, and any food products from cloned animals from the organic sector.

Unfortunately, the FDA has no plans to require any special labeling of foods resulting derived from cloned animals. That is why we at Citizens for Health support Senate Bill S. 414 and House Bill H.R. 992, the Cloned Food Labeling Act, introduced by Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) and Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-CT). Tell Congress to label food from cloned animals!