Peer reviewed ASK-FORCE AF-7 Contribution Klaus Ammann, em. Prof. University of Bern, Switzerland

1. Part one
1.1. 35S-Promoter and the stability of transgene inserts
1.2. Antibiotic marker chapter, status 20090725

1.1. The claim for part one on the 35S promoter and Antibiotic marker genes

Summarized in the abstract published:

“As genetically modified (GM) foods are starting to intrude in our diet concerns have been expressed regarding GM food safety. These concerns as well as the limitations of the procedures followed in the evaluation of their safety are presented. Animal toxicity studies with certain GM foods have shown that they may toxically affect several organs and systems. The review of these studies should not be conducted separately for each GM food, but according to the effects exerted on certain organs it may help us create a better picture of the possible health effects on human beings. The results of most studies with GM foods indicate that they may cause some common toxic effects such as hepatic, pancreatic, renal, or reproductive effects and may alter the hematological, biochemical, and immunologic parameters. However, many years of research with animals and clinical trials are required for this assessment. The use of recombinant GH or its expression in animals should be re-examined since it has been shown that it increases IGF-1 which may promote cancer.”

Dona, A. & Arvanitoyannis, I.S. (2009)
Health Risks of Genetically Modified Foods.
Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition, 49, 2, pp 164 - 175 http://www.informaworld.com/10.1080/10408390701855993

Comments on 1.1. by Klaus Ammann and colleagues cited
General comments
This paper, published recently in “Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition” by the internationally well known editorial house Taylor & Francis, needs to be critically commented for a multitude of reasons:
In a first overview, the reader will find a lot of mostly unconfirmed concerns about the safety of foods derived from GM crops, the citations are extremely filtered in a way to depict a negative picture on GM crops, and the review authors seem to lack proper knowledge about the field of food safety as a whole. They also publish numerous paragraphs as their own writings, whereas they are just taken by copy-paste from other publications, and worse: those placatory passages are selected from papers with a negative bias and with notorious contents, which have been rebutted recently and for the majority even some years ago. Most of those rebuttals are written by the best authorities in the field, well publicized and easily obtainable in the internet or in libraries from the best peer reviewed journals. Thus Dona et al.  give the uninformed reader the wrong picture, as if the food safety situation in 2008 would still be precarious. This is simply not the case and in summary this is a blatant example of scientific distortion of the overall picture in this field of scientific research on food safety.
The text below will give some examples, always supported by peer reviewed literature, which is available in abundance. It is hard to understand that Taylor & Francis let pass such a low quality review with numerous errors, and it is even harder to understand that major efforts in food safety research are simply ignored in this review, or mentioned in a misleading way, such as giving only the outlook and summary comment on one of the major efforts ‘ENTRANSFOOD’ in the European research on food safety: Citing only (Kuiper et al., 2004), which concentrates on some future research efforts, gives the erroneous picture, that ENTRANSFOOD came to the conclusion that food safety is not yet secured with the GM crops. But if you make the effort of reading the major official summary of ENTRANSFOOD (Konig et al., 2004), agreed upon by all researchers participating in this project, then you easily fall on their major conclusion:

“In conclusion, the food safety assessment paradigm as described in this paper, under which any differences in the new food are identified and any hazards and risks characterized, relative to the conventional food or product, clearly establishes whether the test food derived from a GM crop is as safe as the conventional counterpart.  It can even be argued that foods from GM crops are better characterized than other non-regulated plant-derived foods, due to the additional rigor in the current regulatory requirements and testing regime compared to that for conventionally-bred crops.”

It should be mentioned, that this summary is based on an impressive number of joint research papers which have been carefully coordinated in their conclusions by a consortium of the most renowned researchers in food safety today. But let us start with some concrete examples in order to illustrate one of the harsh negative but unfounded statements of the review:

for more text, click: http://www.botanischergarten.ch/AF-7-Dona-rebuttal/AF-7-Dona-20091025-web.pdf

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