It was October 17, 1985 and I was a young newspaper reporter sitting in a room full of dairy farmers at the Grange Hall in Almond, New York. A couple of professors were down from Cornell University for Biotechnology Day. They were going to explain the latest dairy wonder drug, bovine somatotropin, or bovine growth hormone, better known as BGH.
The professors weren’t five minutes into their presentation before the farmers were howling with anger. Bovine growth hormone, the professors promised would increase the amount of milk a cow produced. So why would that make a farmer angry?
Most of the farmers in the room were milking a hundred cows each day and each cow was producing about 1,500 gallons of milk each year. Their fathers had milked half as many cows and had gotten half as much milk from each cow. But while each farmer was producing four times as much milk as his father had, they were making less money.
There was then, and continues to be, a glut of milk on the American market. Most dairy farmers can barely cover their costs of production. More and more, the family dairy farmer, like the men in the Almond Grange Hall, is going out of business, pushed out by the factory farms and chemicals like BGH.
As a reporter, I did a little more digging and found it wasn’t just the farmers who were howling about BGH. Safe-food advocates and the National Institute of Health had serious concerns – everything from pus in the milk to allergic reactions in humans, to an excess of insulin-like growth factor. But let’s just talk about one basic measure of safety. After all, I’ve only got three minutes.
If a cow is injected with bovine growth hormone every two weeks as directed, will any BGH show up in the milk supply? The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said, “No, you’re perfectly safe.”
You see, the Food and Drug Administration ran tests to see if BGH would be passed to consumers in milk. Well, OK, the FDA didn’t actually run tests on BGH milk, but the Monsanto Corporation of St. Louis, Missouri, which makes BGH – they ran tests on BGH milk and the Food and Drug Administration reviewed the data from those tests.
Actually, that’s not right, either. As it turns out, the FDA did not test milk from BGH cows to see if any hormone remained in the milk and if the truth be told, they failed to review the data from the tests conducted by Monsanto, but they did read summaries of those tests which were typed up by the people at Monsanto, and based on those summaries, the Food and Drug Administration decided it was safe for Americans everywhere to drink milk from cows injected with bovine growth hormone. Oh, and by the way, one of the FDA officials who made that decision had been working for Monsanto less than a year earlier. That was 1993.
Last fall, federal health officials in Canada did review the data from those Monsanto studies and – oops! – it looks like those Monsanto summaries were wrong, there does seem to be residual growth hormone in milk products from cows injected with BGH.
In fact, because the Food and Drug Administration turns blind and deaf around corporate liars like Monsanto, the US is the only major country where the use of BGH has been approved.
Remember, the FDA is the agency that’s supposed to protect the public’s health – but it doesn’t protect public health, it protects private wealth.
Got Milk?
It was October 17, 1985 and I was a young newspaper reporter sitting in a room full of dairy farmers at the Grange Hall in Almond, New York. A couple of professors were down from Cornell University for Biotechnology Day. They were going to explain the latest dairy wonder drug, bovine somatotropin, or bovine growth hormone, better known as BGH.
The professors weren’t five minutes into their presentation before the farmers were howling with anger. Bovine growth hormone, the professors promised would increase the amount of milk a cow produced. So why would that make a farmer angry?
Most of the farmers in the room were milking a hundred cows each day and each cow was producing about 1,500 gallons of milk each year. Their fathers had milked half as many cows and had gotten half as much milk from each cow. But while each farmer was producing four times as much milk as his father had, they were making less money.
There was then, and continues to be, a glut of milk on the American market. Most dairy farmers can barely cover their costs of production. More and more, the family dairy farmer, like the men in the Almond Grange Hall, is going out of business, pushed out by the factory farms and chemicals like BGH.
As a reporter, I did a little more digging and found it wasn’t just the farmers who were howling about BGH. Safe-food advocates and the National Institute of Health had serious concerns – everything from pus in the milk to allergic reactions in humans, to an excess of insulin-like growth factor. But let’s just talk about one basic measure of safety. After all, I’ve only got three minutes.
If a cow is injected with bovine growth hormone every two weeks as directed, will any BGH show up in the milk supply? The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said, “No, you’re perfectly safe.”
You see, the Food and Drug Administration ran tests to see if BGH would be passed to consumers in milk. Well, OK, the FDA didn’t actually run tests on BGH milk, but the Monsanto Corporation of St. Louis, Missouri, which makes BGH – they ran tests on BGH milk and the Food and Drug Administration reviewed the data from those tests.
Actually, that’s not right, either. As it turns out, the FDA did not test milk from BGH cows to see if any hormone remained in the milk and if the truth be told, they failed to review the data from the tests conducted by Monsanto, but they did read summaries of those tests which were typed up by the people at Monsanto, and based on those summaries, the Food and Drug Administration decided it was safe for Americans everywhere to drink milk from cows injected with bovine growth hormone. Oh, and by the way, one of the FDA officials who made that decision had been working for Monsanto less than a year earlier. That was 1993.
Last fall, federal health officials in Canada did review the data from those Monsanto studies and – oops! – it looks like those Monsanto summaries were wrong, there does seem to be residual growth hormone in milk products from cows injected with BGH.
In fact, because the Food and Drug Administration turns blind and deaf around corporate liars like Monsanto, the US is the only major country where the use of BGH has been approved.
Remember, the FDA is the agency that’s supposed to protect the public’s health – but it doesn’t protect public health, it protects private wealth.