for more details on the GE/foulbrood link see:
http://www.biotech-info.net/JR_testimony.html
also: http://www.biotech-info.net/bee_j_editorial.html
---

From the "Down on the Farm" column by "Gumboot"
Private Eye magazine 29 Dec 2000, p12

Advocates of genetic engineering portray it as a precision technology  whose effects can be predicted and limited to the modified organism. So  it is appropriate that the case that could destroy that bogus image was  predicted long ago.

In June researchers at Jena University in Germany showed that modified  genetic material in pollen from GM rape could cross the species barrier,  and was positively identified in bacteria from the guts of honey bees.  That, though alarming, was mp surprise because it is known that bacteria  habitually take in and use DNA from other organisms.

In a rational world, that finding alone (even its possibility) would be  enough to stop GMO development dead in its tracks, because if GE material  after its release into the environment can jump into other organisms,  Pandora's box has had its lid blown well and truly off.

It wasn't enough--but it did shed light on a puzzle for American  beekeepers. New World bees suffer a bacterial disease called American  foulbrood (AFB), outbreaks of which have been successfully controlled by  the antibiotic tetracycline for 40 years. In 1996 [the year America  started widespread GE planting] resistance to tetracycline appeared in  bee bacteria in Argentina, the US, and shortly afterwards Canada, the  three countries whihc grow 98 percent of the world's GM crops.

This remarkable coincidence is so far unexplained, but since the German  research a nasty suspicion has formed in beekeeping circles. What had  bees in those specific countries been collecting? Pollen from GM crops  such as rape, maize and soya. And what was used as a "marker gene" in  many of those crops? Why, a gene for tetracycline resistance in bacteria!

The transfer of antibiotic resistance to bugs in farm animals, most of  which are of course given GM feed, has been widely feared. Research to  look at gene transfer in animal guts is ongoing at Leeds University,  where publication by MAFF of early results has been unaccountably held  up.

Circumstantial this bee story may be, but it can only be a matter of time  before one of these backwoods bee keepers needs to make a trip into town  for supplies and posts a few diseased bees to a laboratory which can  identify the source of the resistance. If it is GM, then the splattering  from the faeces.fan interface should waken even the dozy US and Canadian  public, whose own governments have for years forcefully silenced or cast  out the numerous dissidents among their own researchers.

A senior researcher at a British institute describes this scenario as  "entirely plausible"; and of course we now know for certain that modified  genes cannot be confined to the target organisms.