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Appendix Three: Potential Human Health Risks from Bt Plants 151 There are two reasons to draw attention to B. thuringiensis. First, there has been a change in the environmental interface between B. thuringiensis or its cry genes (in plants) and other bacteria. Second, there has been a dramatic change in the environmental interface between B. thuringiensis and humans in the last few decades. These changes are to the concentration of human exposure to the bacterium and/or its toxins, and the variety of ways in which we are being exposed. A change in B. thuringiensis’s environment Worldwide at the turn of the century, 13,000 metric tons of B. thuringiensis were annually produced in fermenters (Anonymous, 1999). Corn and cotton engineered with cry genes covered a claimed 114 million ha in 2007 (Youngsteadt and Stokstad, 2008), an area of the Earth’s surface over 4 times the size of the country of New Zealand (26.8 million ha). Particular strains and alleles of cry/cyt genes are being selectively and significantly amplified by an intervention that takes them outside their natural ecological context. Human enrichment of these sequences provides unprecedented opportunity for recombination with many uncharacterized homologues in the environment. Moreover, transgenic cry genes have a different DNA sequence (de Maagd et al., 1999), making the range of possible recombination products different from simple amplification of the same genes. A change in our environment The scale of human exposure to B. thuringiensis and its toxins also increases with commercial production of B. thuringiensis products and transgenic crops. Traditionally, B. thuringiensis might have been ingested because it is common on grains and in soil that might adhere to raw foods. We may have breathed it in with blowing dust or become infected in a scraped knee. The quantity of B. thuringiensis from these sources is likely extremely low, however. Although it is very difficult to find studies that quantify vegetative B. thuringiensis or spores in soil, my best estimate is that the soil burden is usually under 1,000 spores/g. From a variety of studies it appears that the detection limit varies from 1,000-100,000 spores/g soil, and most sampling regimes fail to detect B. thuringiensis in all soil, grain and water samples that they test (e.g., Apaydin et al., 2005; Martin and Travers, 1989; Quesada-Moraga et al., 2004). A study in New Zealand reported a detection limit for one strain of Bt at 1,000 spores/g soil, and detected none in eight samples (Anonymous, 2003). 1 From the available data, an estimate of 1,000 spores/g would probably err on the generous side and be within an order of magnitude of the correct figure. Routine exposure by ingestion of natural soil is unlikely to be significant. No disease was established in human volunteers fed 3 x 10 9 spores per day for days or rats fed 2 x 10 12 spores per kg (discussed in Drobniewski, 1994). 2 The minimum dose of Bacillus cereus 1 It was not possible to tell from this study whether they failed to detect any B. thuringiensis or failed to detect the particular target strain. 2 I have switched to scientific notation because the numbers get exceedingly large and the nomenclature for naming large numbers can vary by country. For those unfamiliar with scientific notation, the exponent is the number of zeros, so 10 3 = 1,000.
152 Hope Not Hype estimated to cause disease is 10 5 cells or spores (range 200-10 8 ) (Schoeni and Lee Wong, 2005). B. cereus and B. thuringiensis are unreliably distinguishable on the genetic level, meaning that if B. thuringiensis were capable of causing disease, it would probably be no more pathogenic than B. cereus. The best available extrapolation from these data indicates that a minimum of 200 g of soil enriched for an unknown variant of B. thuringiensis would have to be consumed for the minimum disease-causing exposure. After aerial spraying of Bt over the city of Auckland, the New Zealand Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry detected between 10 4 and 10 6 spores of Bt/g soil (up from
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4 Hope Not Hype Chapter Seven: Biot
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14 Hope Not Hype Conclusions The dr
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16 Hope Not Hype Gerbens-Leenes, P.
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18 Hope Not Hype women in the tradi
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20 Hope Not Hype The many quotes an
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22 Hope Not Hype The larger issue t
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24 Hope Not Hype Unlike the public-
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28 Hope Not Hype References Coghlan
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32 Hope Not Hype The Assessment tex
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44 Hope Not Hype Figure 4.1: Lysine
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46 Hope Not Hype Even if all corn p
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48 Hope Not Hype Whether or not som
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50 Hope Not Hype References Antoine
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54 Hope Not Hype The plant science
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56 Hope Not Hype Comments such as S
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58 Hope Not Hype nologies in Midvil
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60 Hope Not Hype The authors of the
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62 Hope Not Hype Tabashnik, B. E.,
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64 Hope Not Hype So far, we do not
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66 Hope Not Hype Does genetic engin
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68 Hope Not Hype Bacillus producing
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70 Hope Not Hype Box 6.1: Do insect
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72 Hope Not Hype chemicals that can
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76 Hope Not Hype Heinemann, J. A. (
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78 Hope Not Hype WHO (2005). Modern
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80 Hope Not Hype The Assessment tex
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82 Hope Not Hype adapted to tempera
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86 Hope Not Hype Future productivit
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88 Hope Not Hype The traditional sm
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90 Hope Not Hype Critically, the pl
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92 Hope Not Hype In places like sub
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96 Hope Not Hype opportunities for
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