Momenta Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (MNTA)

[floblu14]

Somewhat O/T -

If You Eat an Animal That Ate Drugs, Will It Affect You?

Rich Sachleben, PhD

An expert at the American Chemical Society and a fellow in Chemical Development for Momenta Pharmaceuticals who spent thirteen years at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

It depends on what it is. If it’s a drug that humans are particularly sensitive to, and enough of it came through, absolutely. It doesn’t even have to be a hypothetical. It could just be a case where someone, either deliberately or accidentally, exposed an animal to the drug—and if the levels are high enough, and the animal didn’t excrete it in time, then that could pass into humans at potentially hazardous levels. That’s particularly true for the people who are most sensitive—children, the elderly, and people who have some sort of illness. If you have kidney disease, or heart problems, and some drug gets through that happens to be bad for kidneys or the heart, sensitive people could actually have a reaction to that that could imperil their health. It’s far-fetched, but not totally implausible.

So if you feed particular substances to animals, and those animals enter the food-chain and people eat them, will they be exposed to the chemicals that were fed to the animals? The answer is absolutely yes, without question.

The caveat to that is, though, if you feed anything to an animal, it may or may not get changed when it’s in their body. Animals (and people) use sugar for fuel, and convert it into carbon-dioxide and some other things, and it just goes away. That doesn’t mean there’s no sugar in our bodies—there is—but the body controls the levels of it. It either goes out the back end, it gets absorbed and goes out the front end, or it gets changed. Everything we eat, that’s what happens.

But the FDA has rules, and they do inspections, and the agricultural department does inspections. How animals are fed, how they’re treated for medical problems, you know, they feed them certain substances to cause them to gain weight faster. They have to treat them for illnesses, etc etc. Anybody who wants to feed something or sell something as a product that’s going to be consumed by a food animal has to show that that stuff, whatever it happens to be is safe. There are a lot of regulations, and it’s monitored pretty closely.

Read more -

https://gizmodo.com/if-you-eat-an-animal-that-ate-drugs-will-it-effect-you-1797546081