US regulators prepare to OK food made from cloned animals.

The US government has released a draft proposal declaring that food from cloned cattle, pigs and goats is "likely to be as safe as" food from their non-cloned counterparts. The draft, released yesterday, arrives more than five years after the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requested a voluntary moratorium on the use of cloned animals or their offspring for food until their safety could be assessed. The proposal is now open to a 90-day public comment period, after which the FDA is widely expected to officially approve food from some cloned animals for human consumption (for sheep, they say, there is still not enough data); the draft states that the FDA has few concerns about the health of cloned animals or the food that they produce. Industry has been awaiting these findings for years. The FDA released a summary proposal in 2003, but the administration took three more years to produce a full document, citing a lack of sufficient scientific evidence. Since then, the FDA has been gathering data from peer-reviewed studies and unpublished reports from commercial cloning companies. The results of that effort are published in the January 2007 edition of Theriogenology, now available online.1 FDA approval is unlikely to unleash a flood of food from cloned animals — cloning is still too expensive to be used regularly for food production. Instead, the technique will initially be used primarily to clone elite animals for breeding. The offspring of those clones will probably be the first to arrive at the dinner table, although a few clones may wend their way directly into the food supply when they are no longer useful for breeding. more on "www.nature.com":[ http://www.nature.com/news/2006/061225/full/061225-3.html]

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