Children as policy pawns

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Americans take nothing as seriously as the need to protect the health and safety of our children. Public concern about environmental harms has intensified in recent years, and politicians and public health officials have taken notice. Hence, "Children's Health Day," observed on the first Monday of October, which occurs tomorrow.

Seizing an opportunity to further their own agendas, many radical Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) exploit the event by attacking various products and technologies they claim are harmful.

As in many other public health false alarms, NGOs' condemnation of the new biotechnology -- also known as gene splicing, genetic engineering, or genetic modification (GM) -- is less about real concern for children's health than about environmental activists' willingness to exploit children's issues for their own benefit.

Biotechnology has been the target of scare campaigns since the technique was first demonstrated in 1973. Activists like Jeremy Rifkin of the Foundation on Economic Trends have warned against supposed dangers of biotechnology for three decades, calling it "the most radical, uncontrolled experiment we've ever seen," even likening it to "Nazi eugenics."

With varying degrees of subtlety, others such as Greenpeace and the Pew Initiative on Biotechnology and Food, have questioned the new biotechnology's safety. Despite an overwhelming scientific consensus that new molecular methods of the "new biotechnology" pose no inherent risks, critics still argue that splicing genes into plants can cause all sorts of human health risks, including the adding new plant toxins or allergens to the food supply.

The allergy issue is of special concern when children are involved, because children tend to be more sensitive to allergens than are adults. Approximately 5 percent to 8 percent of children have a true allergy to certain types of foods, but only 1 to 2 percent of adults do.

Therefore, if gene-splicing really did increase the risk of introducing new allergens into the food supply, this might pose a genuine children's health issue. How real is this possibility?

Food allergies are a reaction of the body's immune system to a substance or an ingredient in a food, usually a protein. And, because the function of most genes is to provide the cellular blueprint for making proteins, it has been easy for activists to convince the uninformed that a real children's health scare is imminent. But the issue is not so simple.

Both conventional and biotech plant breeding involve introducing new genes into established crop plants. Thus, they both pose a theoretical risk of introducing potentially harmful proteins and other substances into the food supply, some of which could be allergens or toxins. However, the risk for both types of breeding is generally quite small, and the level of risk an individual plant will pose -- either to human health or the environment -- has nothing to do with how it was developed. It depends on the characteristics of the plant being modified and the specific gene or genes added.