Is local milk produced by cows that have been given the bovine growth hormone?
What about mainland milk? I do not want to drink milk produced by some hormone. Local milk producers voluntarily decided against using the hormone years ago, even though the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has “evaluated it extensively” and declared it safe, said Maurice Tamura, chief of the state Food and Drug Branch. Dairy farmers can increase milk production by 10 percent to 15 percent by injecting cows with recombinant bovine somatotropin (BST or rBST), which changes the metabolism of the cow. The FDA said pasteurization destroys about 90 percent of the hormone, natural or otherwise. There is no state requirement for labeling milk that may have been produced by cows given the hormone, Tamura said. “The difficulty with BST is that you cannot analyze for it,” he said. “It’s naturally occurring in cows and you cannot tell the difference between artificial and the naturally occurring” hormone. As far as he could determine, most local dairies continue to adhere to the voluntary agreem
