Genetic Roulette: The Gamble of Our Lives

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | OCTOBER 11, 2012

Are you and your family on the wrong side of a bet? That is the questions asked by the new documentary film Genetic Roulette: The Gamble of Our Lives. The film is a production of the Institute for Responsible Technology.

Genetically Modified Organisms are now part of foods and those GMOs are not properly labeled so consumers can make an informed decision as to what kind of products they can bring home to their families. Although GMOs have been banned or limited in many countries in the developed world, The United States and numerous third world nations haven’t issued such bans or limitations and their populations are exposed to GMOs on a daily basis.

In the United States, the US government has continuously ignored the studies whose results warn about the dangers that GMOs present to human health. The main reason for its refusal to ban GMOs stems from the fact that government agencies that are supposed to protect consumers from dangerous foods are headed by former Monsanto, DuPont, Cargill or Syngenta employees, who despite having a conflict of interest were called by the White House to work as food safety Czars.

Currently, the US allows the cultivation, harvest and use of GMOs for the production of thousands of products that end on dinner tables all across American and many more around the world. The refusal to officially study the effects that GMOs have on humans or to review the results of independently conducted studies resulted in one outcome: the production and sale of unlabeled food products that contain dangerous genetically modified organisms.

The governments that do not properly study and upon confirming the threats posed by GMOs, refuse to ban they production and use in food products are genuinely — as the title of the film says — playing Russian Roulette with the health of the citizenry. The corporate-owned officials are taking a gamble with everyone’s health and are setting the stage to cause mass disease and death in the population and these effects will be extended to the coming generations.

“After two decades, physicians and scientists have uncovered a grave trend. The same serious health problems found in lab animals, livestock, and pets that have been fed GM foods are now on the rise in the US population. And when people and animals stop eating genetically modified organisms (GMOs), their health improves.” But the warnings from these scientists found deaf ears in government agencies that are supposed to review the safety of the foods people ingest.

On September 19, we reported how scientist at CRIIGEN found that GM Maize and Roundup were linked to premature death and cancer. In a study published in “Food and Chemical Toxicology”, researchers led by Professor Gilles-Eric Seralini found that rats fed on a diet containing NK603 Roundup tolerant GM maize or given water containing Roundup, at levels permitted in drinking water and GM crops in the US, developed cancers faster and died earlier than rats fed on a standard diet.

Earlier, on September 14, scientists from the Safe Food Foundation, reported how GM Wheat Could Potentially change the Human Genome by ‘silencing’ genes once GMO wheat was ingested. Judy Carman, a biochemist and Director of the IHERS at Flinders University, warned that during her observations the GMO gene had the potential to silence human genes, which could have serious complications.

The same kind of reactions seen in both CRIIGEN and the Safe Food Foundation’s observations are seen in the studies and personal stories presented on Genetic Roulette. The film is complete with documents that show uncontestable evidence about the dangers of GMOs. The film explains how these laboratory-made organisms deteriorate people’s health, especially that of children and provides suggestions that anyone can implement to protect themselves and their families.

For an in-depth look at how the genetic engineering of foods and products threatens all life forms, read our report here. We highly recommend that you watch Genetic Roulette: The Gamble of Our Lives and spread the information about the dangers of GMOs to everyone you know. Also, join our campaign on Facebook to support the adequate labeling of GMOs on food products.

More information can be found at: http://geneticroulettemovie.com and http://responsibletechnology.org

Order the DVD at: http://seedsofdeception.com/store/dvdcd?product_id=124

Donate to support the The Institute for Responsible Technology: http://www.responsibletechnology.org/donategr

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Exposure to PCB’s May Interfere with Pregnancies

Wired.com
March 2, 2011

PCB exposure may interfere with a woman’s ability to get pregnant, a new study of women undergoing in vitro fertilization suggests. The study of 765 women found that those whose blood contained the highest levels of a particular form of polychlorinated biphenyl — one known as PCB 153 — were 41 percent less likely to give birth than women with the lowest levels.

One contributing factor: Fertilized eggs were half as likely to implant in women if blood concentrations of PCB-153 fell in the top 25 percent of those measured among all participants. The study appeared online Feb. 24 in Environmental Health Perspectives.

In women not undergoing IVF it would be difficult to know when to test for implantation, says John Meeker, who led the new study. So the new data may provide a window into a subtle fertility risk that would be almost impossible to find in the general population, explains Meeker, an environmental and reproductive epidemiologist at the University of Michigan School of Public Health in Ann Arbor.

His team studied blood and urine that had been collected from 765 women treated at fertility clinics in the Boston area between 1994 and 2003. Together, the women had gone through a total of 827 cycles of attempted fertilization — processes that led to 297 live births, 229 implantation failures and 301 pregnancies that naturally terminated within 20 weeks of implantation.

The researchers went into the study suspecting that the risk of implantation failure might be elevated among the most highly exposed women, based on earlier studies by others showing a similar problem in PCB-exposed rodents. Two years ago, Meeker’s team also showed that in women, PCBs can enter follicles, structures that hold egg cells. So this “does suggest that these chemicals can make it to a place where they would be in contact with the maturing egg,” he says.

More than 200 related PCBs exist. Most people inadvertently encounter a broad mix of these, including traces of PCB-153, through food and the environment. Because some of these pollutants are difficult and costly to measure in blood, the researchers tested for the sum of all PCBs as well as for a narrow spectrum of specific ones or mixes of several with related functional attributes, such as binding to hormone receptors in cells or — in PCB-153’s case — an ability to turn on certain detoxifying enzymes.

The authors caution that although they found the strongest signs of potential fertility risks associated with PCB-153, there were hints that other PCBs might also impair fertility. The team notes that PCB-153 might even serve as a marker for one or more other reproductively toxic PCBs — or related pollutants — that co-occur in the environment.

“I find the data intriguing — and think they have something here,” says David Carpenter, director of the Institute for Health and the Environment at the University at Albany in New York. “I’m also underwhelmed,” he adds.

The researchers probed for a number of different reproductive endpoints, he says, including miscarriage, and what are known as chemical pregnancies — where a fertilized egg dies before a fetal heartbeat can be detected. Only implantation failures appeared at rates greater than would be expected by chance. And only for PCB-153, he adds, not for any of several different PCBs or PCB combinations.

The data would be more convincing, Carpenter says, if the authors could point to some mechanism by which PCBs might impair reproduction — such as changing the permeability of the outer membrane of egg cells.

Several years ago, Carpenter’s team showed that some cells — nerve cells and immature immune cells — can incorporate PCBs, including PCB-153, altering the fluidity of the cells’ membranes. “Something as fundamental as changing the fluidity of the membrane in the oocyte [egg cell] or uterus could, in fact, have dramatic effects on implantation,” Carpenter says.

Until their U.S. production was banned in 1979, most PCBs were used as insulating liquids in electrical transformers. Over the years, PCBs also have found use in other applications, including as an ingredient of exterior building caulk and in some floor finishes. Because many PCB-containing materials are still in use and because any PCBs that enter the environment do not readily break down, people continue to encounter exposure to these potentially toxic compounds, most often through contaminated food.