MEAT and milk from cloned animals is "likely" to be as safe to consume as non-cloned food products, but won't be on supermarket shelves soon, a U.S. government agency said in a draft report.

"Edible products from normal, healthy clones or their progeny do not appear to pose increased food consumption risk relative to comparable products from conventional animals," concluded the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) study.

Pending further study, however, "these products should not be released into the food supply," said the study, which examined mainly cattle, pigs and goats. It said little information was available on sheep.

The FDA said that while evidence so far "indicates that food products derived from animal clones and their offspring are likely to be as safe to eat as food from their non-clone counterparts," they are unlikely to show up in U.S. shops any time soon.

At "a cost of tens of thousands of dollars per clone," the technology remains too expensive for farmers to slaughter clones for meat, the FDA said.

Federal health regulators began looking at cloned food safety two years ago, when it became clear that the cloning technique that led to the 1996 birth of Dolly the sheep in Scotland had commercial potential.

Livestock breeders have expressed interest in using cloning, which allows them to generate large numbers of animals from a single donor, to replicate their best animals. The technique also could be used to expand populations of endangered species, the FDA said.

The findings applied only to cloned animals. Researchers did not examine animals that had been altered through genetic engineering.

 
Editor: Wings