US FDA searching for little piglets who went to market

The US Food and Drug Adminis-tration (FDA) is searching for 386 pigs that went to market when they should have stayed home.

The piglets were all bred from genetically modified sows involved in a research experiment and then sold to a livestock broker without FDA authorization.

The assumption is that most of them made it into the food chain, according to officials who became aware of the mistake last week.

FDA investigators will take any of the piglets they track down off the market, but they acknowledged Thursday that they are probably too late -- the Illinois university researchers have been selling off the pigs since April 2001.

FDA officials and researchers in the animal sciences department at the University of Illinois, who bred the pigs, insist that the mix-up is not a cause for concern, although critics of genetically modified food have cautioned that the effect of these foreign agents on humans remains unknown.

"We're very confident that no pig with trans-genes made it through our very comprehensive screening process," said Bill Murphy, spokesman for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The researchers tested all the piglets for the presence of the trans-genes or any expression thereof be-fore selling them off for slaughter.

The FDA also sought to quash any fears about threats to public health Wednesday, noting in a statement that "all available scientific evidence indicates that [the meat] would present no risk to public health."

The agency also pointed out that the genes would only be expressed in adult female pigs and the animals sold for slaughter were all piglets.

The aim of the researchers' experiment was to breed sows that would provide better quality nutrition to their offspring and hence allow farmers to raise bigger pigs faster.

To that end, the mostly female pigs had two genes added to their DNA -- a cow gene that increases milk production and a synthetic gene that makes the milk easier for piglets to digest.

FDA officials noted the genes were engineered so that the proteins would be produced primarily, if not exclusively, in the mammary glands of lactating sows.