Monsanto Company

Monsanto Responds To Allegations Regarding the Use of Antibiotic Resistance Markers

In answer to questions raised by Sunday Times reporter Paul Nuki, Monsanto's director of corporate affairs in London, Tony Combes, replied for publication in the article as follows:

"There is nothing new in these allegations, taken from a 2 month old and publicly available advice paper from the UK Advisory Committee on Novel Foods and Processes. The considered view of the whole advisory committee does NOT conclude that people will contract gonorrhea and all your allegations, together with Monsanto and EU scientists' robust refutations, are on our web page (http://www.monsanto.co.uk), for readers and others to judge for themselves.

We strongly dispute your allegations - for example, you are wrong - the crop has NOT been banned in Europe."

Tony Combes ended by alerting the Sunday Times that the full text of their six points will be made available on the the Monsanto UK web site in accordance with Monsanto's policy of making as much information as possible available, together with a series of detailed rebuttals.

He added, "Unfortunately, all too often risk is judged solely on the horror that is imagined to be the worst possible theoretical outcome, rather than the statistics of how likely any risk actually is in the real world."

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