• The Washington Post, Tuesday, January 15, 2008 11:30 AM

A 968-page Food and Drug Administration "final risk assessment" concludes that foods from healthy cloned animals and their offspring are as safe as those from ordinary animals. The impending release of the report will remove the last regulatory barrier to the marketing of meat and milk from cloned cattle, pigs and goats.

The agency report includes hundreds of pages of raw data so that others can see how it came to its conclusions. The report also acknowledges that human health concerns are not the only issues raised by the emergence of cloned farm animals. "Moral, religious and ethical concerns ... have been raised," the agency notes in a document accompanying the report. But the risk assessment is "strictly a science-based evaluation," it reports.

Looking ahead, the report says FDA is collaborating with veterinary and scientific organizations, notably the International Embryo Transfer Society, to create a database on the health of new clones, which will help the agency track the field as the industry grows.

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