Wal-Mart removes hormones from milk
Last updated Friday, March 21, 2008 5:56 PM CDT in Business
By Kimberly Morrison
THE MORNING NEWS
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has eliminated hormones from its private label milk following a horrifying and false rumor about a series of hormonal abnormalities a young girl experienced in connection to drinking it.
It's an artificial growth hormone called recombinant bovine somatotrophin (rBST), and Wal-Mart announced Friday that Great Value milk and its Sam's Club counterpart are newly free from it.
The hormone is a common injection for dairy cattle and has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration since 1985. The FDA has said milk from cows treated with rBST poses no risk to humans.
Wal-Mart spokeswoman Deisha Galberth said the switch happened because "customers have expressed a desire for milk choices" while maintaining that "we don't make business decisions based on rumors."
But at a time when food and product recalls have heightened consumer's sensitivity to the safety of goods, a rapidly spreading Internet and e-mail rumor about alleged side effects from consuming Wal-Mart milk threatened to damage the retailer's reputation, and so it responded.
In an unlikely move, the retailer's statement on the rumor contained a link to a hoax hunter Web site that said researchers had investigated and determined the story wasn't true. Wal-Mart was careful to not directly address the rumor.
"All of Wal-Mart's dairy selections, including organic, meet (U.S. Department of Agriculture) and FDA standards, and we provide a variety of both organic and conventional dairy offerings to give our customers a choice - many of which have chosen not to use rBST," Wal-Mart said in the Web statement posted Dec. 4 to walmartfacts.com.
It was about the same time that the retailer began working with its dairy producers to eliminate milk sourced from cows injected with rBST. Wal-Mart's dairy providers have since given written commitment to not inject their cattle with hormones.
The rumor, written as a first-person account from a family member, told of "Marissa," a girl whose early menstruation, lactation and eventual hysterectomy had baffled the family's doctors in Houston for years, so much that the e-mail claims they planned to write a medical journal discovery on her.
As the story goes, the girl's father embarked on some Internet sleuthing when he found out about rBST in Wal-Mart milk, which the family had always consumed. After the girl stopped drinking Wal-Mart milk, the problems ceased.
As it turns out, neither "Marissa" nor her parents "Mitzi and Kyle Lyons" of Gainsville, Texas could be located.
Rich Buhler of truthorfiction.com said he's confident they don't exist.
"Ordinarily when we list something like this as unproven, we will almost immediately be contacted by someone who will give us the leads we need to prove the story as valid. So far, we've had no such response to this one," Buhler said.
Buhler said stories that involve a health warning or alert about a defective product get the greatest amount of circulation because "people would hate for friends of family to be harmed just because they failed to forward an e-mail."
The continued circulation can annoy businesses that seek to silence the rumor, and sometimes damage their image.
"Some e-rumors have created trouble for companies that has been felt by their public relations company or their balance sheet. Most of the companies will not comment in detail about the impact of e-rumors, but the amount of effort they put into trying to refute them reveals their concerns," Buhler said.
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