Editor, RE: “How safe substances become dangerous” (The New Times, August 21). I will go with the conclusions of the International Agency on Research on Cancer (IARC) any time over this kind of advertorial shilling for the genetically modified foods (GMO) industry. Every time an internationally respected institution, like the IARC, or world renowned individuals like Dr Arpad Pusztai, raise alarms on the basis of peer reviewed findings from solid research about the dangers to human health of GMO and the processes involved in their production, we see these kinds of attacks from academic and ‘scientific’ shills in industry-funded academic and research institutions. We saw exactly the same pattern of attacks from similar people during the long struggle to recognise smoking as a carcinogenic. Then, a similar horde of academics, researchers and even doctors, generously funded by the powerful tobacco industry argued strenuously that there was no link between smoking and cancer. Not because they all believed what they were claiming (some may have, which shows how little those with such titles may really know), but because they were being paid by the industry to attempt to discredit more objective findings of the dangers of their product to human health. Let us not make the same mistake with GMOs which have the potential to cause far more damage to our health and impair humanity’s future than even tobacco ever could. Let us adopt the precautionary principle on GMOs until we have real proof, not self-interested declarations from industry shills, that these things are not harmful over the long term. People, and especially our policy-makers, should read Steven Druker’s “Altered Genes, Twisted Truth” before they jump on the falsely seductive GMO bandwagon. Precaution should be our guide. Mwene Kalinda
