Pat;s Note: It may have made the front page of the Sunday Times, but
it isn't going to happen.

Two members of the family rely on either pig transplants or pig
enzymes to stay alive - and that is not uncommon these days.

Winston will have a tough job finding any pigs free of PMWS or other
circoviruses, even in Missouri. 

I though everyone had got the point by now that pigs are too like us
to allow for the kind of reckless science associated with Britain's
veterinary industry.

When mutated PMWS was covered up in Britain in 1999, it did not just
screw up the livestock industry and public health, it also halted any
such experimental work, whatever the eventual potential benefits.

For once Defra did get it right in stepping in and stopping it.
Presumably they did not tell Lord Winston the real reason otherwise,
he would not be trying to continue in the US.

When first you set up to deceive...

Anyway, they did at least do something right for a change.

Doubtless America will follow.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article4692850.ece

The Sunday Times September 7, 2008

Lord Winston to farm pigs for transplantsSarah-Kate Templeton 
Lord Winston, the fertility expert and Labour peer, is to begin
breeding genetically modified pigs in the next three months to produce
hearts, livers and kidneys for transplanting to humans. 

Winston has pioneered a simplified technique to create pigs with
“humanised” organs that will not be rejected by the patients’ immune
systems. 

He expects the technique to provide a solution to the shortage of
donor organs within 10 years. Attempts to transplant animal organs –
xenotrans-plantation – were abandoned because the tissue was rejected
and because of fears that animal viruses would spread to humans.
Enthusiasm for the procedure waned in the late 1990s after patient
deaths. 

Winston and his colleague, Dr Carol Readhead of the California
Institute of Technology, believe pigs can be genetically modified to
exclude the dangerous viruses. 

He says his method could see hundreds of genetically modified pigs
reared simultaneously for their organs. Organs could be taken from
pigs as young as one year. 

He says xeno-transplantation is the best hope to tackle the shortage
of organs. A record number of almost 8,000 British patients are
waiting for an organ. 

The government is considering imposing presumed consent, whereby
organs would be taken from the dead unless they had specifically
expressed a wish not to give them away, though experts say this will
not solve the problem. 

In an article for The Sunday Times, Winston said other options also
had shortcomings: “Artificial, human-made devices, like mechanical
hearts, never work as well as biologically produced organs. And
although huge publicity has recently been given to the idea of growing
organs, culturing hearts and livers possibly from stem cells, this
technology is still very primitive and is unlikely to come to fruition
in the next 20 to 30 years. 

“Pigs organs are the right size for human transplantation and they
work similarly to human organs.” 

Winston’s method of creating genetically modified animals involves
either injecting human genes, carried by a virus, into the testicles
of the piglets or adding them directly to the sperm. He argues the
technique is more feasible and humane than rival methods, which
involve cloning pigs and adding the genes to the cloned embryos before
they are transferred into the sow’s womb. 

Winston has filed several patents covering the technique and claims it
“carries huge commercial opportunities”. 

He is moving the research project from Britain to America after
British regulations and a shortage of funding prevented experiments
here. The pigs will be bred in Missouri. 

In his article Winston added: “It has been difficult to pursue the
research in the UK . . . Having got pigs producing transgenic sperm,
we were suddenly informed we could not mate them because of some Defra
[Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs] and EU
regulations. We are not even permitted to do postmortems on the pigs
so we cannot prove we have been successful.” 

Defra said the breeding of genetically modified animals for research
was permitted by the Home Office if a licence was granted. A spokesman
said, however, that scientists must meet the criteria for a licence to
be granted. 

Xenotransplantation has been fiercely opposed by ethicists. In a
report for the Department of Health in 2003, Professor Sheila McLean,
director of the Institute of Law and Ethics in Medicine at Glasgow
University, warned the government that potentially lethal viruses
could be passed from pigs to humans. 

-- 
Regards
Pat Gardiner
Release the results of testing British pigs for MRSA and C.Diff now!
www.go-self-sufficient.com  and http://animal-epidemics.blogspot.com/