UK says impurities in Aventis GM trial

LONDON, Aug 15 (Reuters) - Britain said on Thursday that small impurities
in field trials of Aventis CropScience Ltd's genetically modified rapeseed
made it resistant to two antibiotics but this posed no health or
environmental risk. 

The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) said
Aventis informed it that all the seed is resistant to the herbicide
glufosinate ammonium, but up to 2.8 percent of it contains a modification
with an additional gene that confers resistance to the antibiotics
neomycin and kanamycin. 

"Scientific experts on the Advisory Committee on Releases to the
Environment (ACRE) advise that this does not present any risk to human
health as the antibiotic resistance gene occurs naturally in bacteria, and
so the antibiotics have few medical uses," DEFRA said in a statement. 
ACRE also said the modification does not pose any risks to the
environment, but DEFRA notes the release of the additional GM rape is not
approved for farm scale evaluations and the GM Inspectorates for England
and Scotland are investigating. 

The crop will be harvested and destroyed, as in all previous farm scale
evaluation trials. 

"ACRE are critical of both Aventis, for a lapse in the quality control of
their seeds, and the regulatory authorities for not detecting it," the
statement said. 

Aventis CropScience was recently purchased by Bayer AG from Franco-German
drugs group Aventis SA .