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U.S. Laboratory Testing Transgenic Rice On Peruvian Children
 
Posted on Friday, June 16 2006 14:08:30 PDT by Intellpuke
Read 1724 times 

The Peruvian Medical Association denounced that Ventria, a pharmaceutical company from the U.S., is experimenting with lactating infants to evaluate the effectiveness of their pharmaceutical rice for use in acute diarrhea, reports Eduardo Aragon from TeleSur in Venezuela.
This transgenic rice is modified to produce the protein Lactoferrin. According to Herbert Cuba Garcia, spokesman for the association, "these genetic changes are not allowed in Peru".

Cuba Garcia announced that Ventria Biosciences is performing a test in 140 children in public hospitals in the Peruvian capital, Lima, and in the locality of Trujillo, with the approval of the Ministry of Health.

Lawyers mounting a defense of children's rights have considered this case as a violation of the laws and the Codes for Children and Adolescents.

"Children, as any other human being, have rights and have the right of freedom in their development and health, which should not be a matter of experimentation, especially when the possible outcomes of the experiments are not known", said Norma Rojas, attorney for Accion por los Ninos (Action on Behalf of Children).


Ms. Rojas expressed that when it comes to children's rights there must be a primacy of the Superior Interest Principle, in other words, the principle stating that one must do what is most beneficial for the child, and that this principle cannot be overruled by experimentation or legislation.

Cuba Garcia said the experiment is financed by the American company.

Peru's Minister of Health, Pilar Mazzeti, said that they "have requested the director of the hospital, the director of the National Institute of Health, as well as other organizations involved in this matter to provide information to see if they have fulfilled all the requirements needed to perform work, particularly on minors".

The Nutritional Research Institute, which performed the experiment on behalf of Ventria in Peru, has stated that in this clinical study all norms at the national and international levels was respected with regards both to human subjects research as well as bioethics.

Intellpuke: "The original article on this is in Spanish and can be found here ->http://www.telesurtv.net/home14jun6.php (http://www.telesurtv.net/home14jun6.php) . This article was brought to Free Internet Press' attention by personnel at the Center for Food Safety, affiliated with Californians for GE-Free Agriculture, and we thank them for doing so.