The U.S. government says food from cloned animals is safe to eat and doesn't require any special labeling.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), after more than five years of study, declared Thursday that cloned livestock is "virtually indistinguishable" from conventional livestock,

Meat and milk from cattle, swine and goat clones is "as safe to eat as the food we eat every day," said Stephen Sundlof, director of the FDA Center for Veterinary Medicine.

A final decision on labelling food derived from these cloned animals is still pending, but officials said they don't believe special labels are needed.

Because scientists concluded there is no difference between food from clones and food from other animals, "it would be unlikely that FDA would require labelling in those cases," said Sundlof.

A biotechnology expert says labels should only be used if the health characteristics of a food are significantly altered by how it is produced.

"The bottom line is, we don't want to misinform consumers with some sort of implied message of difference," Barb Glenn of the Biotechnology Industry Organization told The Associated Press.

"There is no difference. These foods are as safe as foods from animals that are raised conventionally."

Final approval is still months away, however, and the agency says it will accept comments from the public for the next three months.

Concerns

Some consumer groups, however, insist on labels because the verdict is still out on the safety of food from cloned animals. Further, surveys have shown the public is uncomfortable with the idea of cloned livestock.

"Consumers are going to be having a product that has potential safety issues and has a whole load of ethical issues tied to it, without any labeling," Joseph Mendelson, legal director of the Center for Food Safety, told AP.

Carol Tucker Foreman, director of food policy at the Consumer Federation of America, alleged the FDA is turning a blind eye to research that shows cloning results in more deaths and deformed animals than other reproductive technologies.

She said the consumer federation will ask food companies and supermarkets to refuse to sell food from clones.

"Meat and milk from cloned animals have no benefit for consumers, and consumers don't want them in their foods," said Foreman.

Final approval of cloned animals for food is months away, although scientists with the FDA wrote that by the time clones reached six to 18 months of age, they were virtually indistinguishable from conventionally bred animals.

The FDA will accept comments from the public after issuing a draft risk assessment on Thursday.

No products of cloned animals are currently on the market in North America -- although a livestock company submitted a request to Health Canada in 2003 to sell meat from cloned animals.

Health Canada would not reveal the name of the company and said it was still exploring the risks associated with meat from cloned animals.

On its website, however, Health Canada says that based on current scientific understanding, products of animals generated through cloning techniques that use embryonic cells "are considered not to pose a food safety concern."

In cloning, the nucleus of a donor egg is removed and replaced with the DNA of a cow, pig or other animal.

A tiny, electric shock coaxes the egg to grow into a copy of the original animal. Cloning companies say it's just another reproductive technology, such as artificial insemination. But there can be differences between the two because of chance and environmental influences.

Critics have said during the process, genetic errors can be made. For example, it's possible that a cloned animals' cell could overproduce a certain protein, and that the consequences on humans is not known.

Meanwhile, those in favor of cloning technology say it would be used primarily for breeding and not for steak or pork tenderloin. Cloning allows farmers and ranchers make copies of exceptional animals, such as pigs that fatten rapidly or cows that are superior milk producers.

"It's not a genetically engineered animal; no genes have been changed or moved or deleted," Glenn said. "It's simply a genetic twin that we can then use for future matings to improve the overall health and well-being of the herd."

Consumers, therefore, would mostly get food from their offspring and not the clones themselves, added Glenn.

AP reports that some clones, however, would still eventually end up in the food supply. As with conventional livestock, a cloned bull or cow that has passed its useful years would probably end up at a hamburger plant and a cloned dairy cow would be milked during its breeding years.

But that is unlikely to happen soon since FDA officials, since 2001, have asked farmers and cloning companies to voluntarily keep clones and their offspring out of the food supply. The informal ban would remain in place for several months while FDA accepts comments from the public.

Some surveys have shown people are uncomfortable with food from cloned animals. In a September poll by the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology, a nonpartisan research group, 64 per cent of those surveyed said they were uncomfortable with the idea.

With files from The Associated Press