Japanese Scientists Say Cloned Animals Are Safe to Eat

The Japanese Food Safety Commission has made the first out of a long line of assessments regarding the quality of meat, milk, and other products derived from cloned animals, and the results are satisfying to those involved in the cloning industry. The FSC said that, if the cloned animals were safe, there was no reason to suspect that the processed products derived from them were not. The technique of cloning is, though, considered to be of paramount importance in Japan, for increasing livestock productivity and eliminating dependency on foreign stocks.

The current decision is but one out of a long list, and the FSC still has a lot of testing to do before it makes its final recommendations to the authorities. Representatives say that preliminary data shows that, scientifically speaking, consuming meat processed from cloned cattle, for example, will not have any harmful effect on the health of the general population, if the animals themselves are healthy. They add that there is no substantial difference between animals that are cloned and those that are breed naturally, except the time they take to start yielding products.

"The working group focused on the assessment of the health of cloned cattle and hogs. The assumption of their discussion was that if such animals are healthy, food made from them would be safe," Kazuo Funasaka, FSC spokesman, said on Tuesday. "Their conclusion is that based on the scientific knowledge and information available at present, such food is as safe as cattle and hogs bred conventionally."

The decision of the Commission is crucial to the entire public opinion in Japan, which has already been subjected to a large number of food-related scandals over the past few years, and is now reticent to accept any new products coming from cloned animals. Regardless of this fact, the Japanese health Ministry requested the food safety watchdog to conduct a thorough assessment of this situation, and to conclude scientifically if cloned meat is safe for human consumption or not.

Since 1998, the nation has cloned more than 550 animals, mostly cattle, but only for research purposes, as the government states. Japan is one of the global pioneers in cloning technologies, and says that, if the process gets approved by the FSC, it could start mass-producing cloned animals fairly soon.