August 10, 2010
WASHINGTON. Vitamin A deficiency, a nutritional imbalance that can result in blindness and death and may affect 130 million children worldwide could be alleviated through wider use of genetically modified oil from mustard seeds, according to a new paper by RFF researchers. They find that in India, which has the largest affected population worldwide, the novel method is a viable public health option, given the poor reach of existing measures.
Cost-Effectiveness of Golden Mustard for Treating Vitamin A Deficiency in India, by RFF Senior Fellow and Director, Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy Ramanan Laxminarayan and coauthors Jeffrey Chow and Eili Y. Klein, will be published in a forthcoming issue of PLoS ONE, an interactive open-access journal for the communication of all peer-reviewed scientific and medical research. The article will be available online upon publication.
In addition to harming children, vitamin A deficiency (VAD) in India also afflicts pregnant and lactating women, striking disproportionately among low-income households. Twice-a-year, high-dose vitamin A supplements can compensate for reduced dietary intake. But in India only a third of targeted children receive the recommended doses, and experts say that new strategies are urgently needed.
A novel solution analyzed by the authors turns out to be mustard, a crop that can be genetically modified into a golden variety to express high levels of beta-carotene, a precursor to vitamin A.
While the genetic modification of rice has been suggested to alleviate vitamin A deficiency in India, GM fortification of mustard presents specific advantages. By comparison to the golden rice, modified mustard seed can express significantly higher concentrations of beta-carotene, making only a few drops a day sufficient to satisfy recommended vitamin A intake. In addition, cooking oil from pressed mustard seed is commonly used in northern India where VAD is most widely prevalent, especially among poor rural families that are often underserved by supplementation programs. Finally, vitamin A is more easily digested when consumed with a moderate amount of fat, such as edible oil.
In their paper, Laxminarayan and his colleagues compared predicted costs and benefits of genetically modified fortification of mustard seed with both high-dose vitamin A supplementation and industrial fortification of mustard oil during processing. They applied standardized economic measures to quantify the cost-effectiveness of each strategy, relying on a wide range of existing estimates for key parameters such as reduction in mortality rates.
They found that over a period of 20 years all three interventions are likely to result in fewer potential deaths from VAD even under conservative assumptions. Expanding vitamin A supplements to all areas was the least costly strategy, while genetically fortified mustard had the potential to avert even greater number of deaths, given that the intervention is not limited to a specific age group and not dependent on access to primary health facilities.
Although supplementation is the least costly intervention, our findings also indicate that GM fortification could reduce the VAD disease burden to a substantially greater degree because of its wider reach, they write. Given the difficulties in expanding supplementation to areas without functioning primary health facilities GM fortification of mustard seed is an attractive alternative, and further exploration of this technology is warranted.
A genetic fortification strategy can play an important role as part of a more far-reaching effort to reducing the prevalence of VAD in India, the paper suggests. But such strategies would have to overcome many operational challenges including those of securing regulatory approval for the new crop varieties. Golden mustard is not the proverbial silver bullet to solve vitamin A deficiencies. Yet, with evidence that millions of children and women in India and worldwide can benefit from even modest increases in consumption of the vitamin, the authors argue that genetic fortification can be a cost-effective tool to be used alongside more traditional methods to address nutrient deficiencies.
FOR RELEASE: Embargo until 17:00 EDT on August 10, 2010
CONTACT: Griffin LeNoir, 202-328-5096, [email protected]
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