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| December
1999
Genetically Modified Food Safety a Concern By Tracy Chan RELATED
ARTICLE: With the rapid increase in the global population, food shortage is the most urgent problem to be solved. And according to Prof. Tsui Kwok Wing of the Department of Biochemistry at the Chinese University, the emergence of genetically modified food may solve the problem. In fact, farmers have applied cross-fertilization of selected plants in agriculture for centuries, aiming at improving the quality of crops and increasing the yield of crops. According to Prof. Tsui, American scientists started using genetic engineering in growing plants in the ’80s. He said that genetic engineering was a kind of biotechnology in which shuffling of genes took place between organisms of the same or different species. A gene is the basic unit of inheritance and consists of a certain length of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA. It is possible for a gene to travel from one species to another because the genetic coding method is universal for all living organisms. Genetic engineering makes use of this characteristic of genes and combines several beneficial characteristics of different species in a single organism. Prof. Tsui said genetically modified food could be classified into three types. The first type is made from genetically engineered microorganisms. The second one is made with the changes in the composition of the natural food’s genes. And the third type is the one containing genetically engineered additives. These genetically modified foods may have many impacts to human health. For example, a gene of the Brazil nut was once transferred to soya beans so as to increase the amount of sulphur-rich amino acids in soya beans. Antibiotic resistance that is added to the crop during genetic engineering is another thing that may cause serious problems. There is a potential hazard that these antibiotic-resistant genes will be transferred to human pathogens. The pathogens may then get resistant to clinic antibiotics, and doctors could no longer use antibiotics to cure patients and there would be a shortage of effective antibiotics in the near future. Such kinds of health hazards raise concerns about setting up regulations. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, there are two reasons to label genetically modified food. One is to prevent consumers from getting allergies after having eaten genetically modified food. The other is to inform people when the nutrition content of the food is changed after genetic engineering. In Hong Kong, there is no labelling requirement for genetically modified food. Said Miss Sheryl Yu, spokeswoman for the Hygiene Division of the Department of Health: “So far, there has been no evidence showing that genetically modified food available in the market is less safe than foods derived from conventional technologies. “Producers argue that if a genetically modified food has passed quality review by government authorities, it should be safe, and there’s no need to label it.” |
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