From: "Malcolm J. Sickels" <mjsickel@umich.edu>

Subject: Re: Milk: Bovine growth hormone? Occurs naturally!

> As far as bovine growth hormone goes, the

> reason that testing is not done is because all milk contains bovine growth

> hormone regardless of whether or not the cow producing the milk is

> receiving bovine growth hormone. In other words all milk contains

> naturally occurring bovine growth hormone and therefore it would be useless

> to test for it.

>From what I remember when the whole rBGH thing came out (I read everyhting

I could get my hands on --pro and con) was that rBGH (a.k.a. BST) was not

identical to naturally occurring BGH. Pretty close, but not the same (was

it one amino acid different? like sickle-cell hemoglobin from regular?).

At the time there was no test to find the difference, but I recall reading

that someone had devised a test for rBGH since then.

The most problematic part of this whole debate was the language since

while people usually knew what they were trying to talk about, they

weren't so precise with the names they used (BGH or rBGH or BST) and often

it was difficult to tell what exactly they were talking about.

Mac