GMO Soy Linked to Sterility, Infant Mortality

After feed­ing ham­sters for two years over three gen­er­a­tions, those on the GM diet, and espe­cially the group on the max­i­mum GM soy diet, showed dev­as­tat­ing results. By the third gen­er­a­tion, most GM soy-fed ham­sters lost the abil­ity to have babies. They also suf­fered slower growth, and a high mor­tal­ity rate among the pups.

And if this isn’t shock­ing enough, some in the third gen­er­a­tion even had hair grow­ing inside their mouths—a phe­nom­e­non rarely seen, but appar­ently more preva­lent among ham­sters eat­ing GM soy.

The study, jointly con­ducted by Surov’s Institute of Ecology and Evolution of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the National Association for Gene Security, is expected to be pub­lished in three months (July 2010)—so the tech­ni­cal details will have to wait. But Surov sketched out the basic set up for me in an email.

He used Campbell ham­sters, with a fast repro­duc­tion rate, divided into 4 groups. All were fed a nor­mal diet, but one was with­out any soy, another had non-GM soy, a third used GM soy, and a fourth con­tained higher amounts of GM soy. They used 5 pairs of ham­sters per group, each of which pro­duced 7-8 lit­ters, totally 140 animals.

Surov told The Voice of Russia, “Originally, every­thing went smoothly. However, we noticed quite a seri­ous effect when we selected new pairs from their cubs and con­tin­ued to feed them as before. These pairs’ growth rate was slower and reached their sex­ual matu­rity slowly.”

He selected new pairs from each group, which gen­er­ated another 39 lit­ters. There were 52 pups born to the con­trol group and 78 to the non-GM soy group. In the GM soy group, how­ever, only 40 pups were born. And of these, 25% died. This was a five­fold higher death rate than the 5% seen among the con­trols. Of the ham­sters that ate high GM soy con­tent, only a sin­gle female ham­ster gave birth. She had 16 pups; about 20% died.

Surov said “The low num­bers in F2 [third gen­er­a­tion] showed that many ani­mals were sterile.”

The pub­lished paper will also include mea­sure­ments of organ size for the third gen­er­a­tion ani­mals, includ­ing testes, spleen, uterus, etc. And if the team can raise suf­fi­cient funds, they will also ana­lyze hor­mone lev­els in col­lected blood samples.

Click here to read the rest of this arti­cle at Institute for Responsible Technology.