The curious incident of silence about mistreated animals

Numbers of lost pups about which we have Austrian silence. ISO represents numbers of dead mice pups lost when fed non-GM feed. GM were fed GM-feed.The average level of death was 8%.(Click to enlarge)

“Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
“To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
“That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.

Silver Blaze
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

An earlier GMO Pundit post featured the reports by Austrian scientists Velimirov and colleagues, made public about a week ago at a press conference, concerning their experiments on feeding both genetically modified corn and conventional corn to mice.

These scientists highlighted the results they believe they had obtained relating to mouse fertility. Other scientists have contested their interpretation, and those misgivings are also presented in an earlier post at GMO Pundit.

But the Austrians also presented data in their report about deaths of mice in their reproductive study.

Most curiously the high death rate in this laboratory (averaging ~8% among these mice) has not been discussed by the Austrian scientists or in their report. Experts in this area tell the Pundit that 1% loss would be a value indicating good lab practice.

Possibly this is of interest to animal rights pressure groups, and the Austrian scientists wanted to keep quiet about conditions in laboratory that led to somewhere near 8% of the baby mice dying, or being eaten perhaps by male parental mice.

But there is an even curiouser and curiouser aspect of this experiment.

The GM-fed mice survived better (see graph above and Table 59 of the Austrian report, below, plus other experiments in the study). The differences in favour of GM-feed are possibly not statistically significant, but its hard to tell because the Austrian group did not comment explicitly on these disturbing deaths, neither did they provide a very detailed statistical analysis. If they had subjected their report to peer-review publication instead of press-release, we would not have these uncertainties.

One also would have thought that as the Austrians were really interested in whether or not genetically modified corn could influence health, that they would have noticed that the mice fed genetically modified seeds were better off. Again their silence on this issue might be to avoid attracting the anger of groups like PETA ,who can get rather aggressive about laboratories that mistreat mice.

Table 59 from report of Velimirov et al 2008. (Click to enlarge)