Brussels, 01/04/2005 (Agence Europe) - The European Commission regrets the accidental importation into the EU of a genetically modified maize for which marketing approval has never been granted. Since 2001, one thousand tonnes of Bt10 maize produced by the Swiss group, Syngenta, have been inadvertently imported in the EU to be used in food and feed. The European Commissioner responsible for the dossier, Markos Kyprianou, has therefore called on Syngenta and the US authorities to provide information to allow Member States to detect the presence of this GMO and to act in consequence. On 21 March this year, Syngenta recognised that “small quantities” of unauthorised Bt10 maize had been inadvertently released by the United States from 2001 to 2004. The company asserted that there was no great difference between the GMO in question and maize Bt11 (resistant to maize pyralid), which has been authorised in Europe since 1998 and in the United States since 1996 for crops and consumption. According to the latest revelations in this affair, the Swiss group reportedly hid the fact that Bt10 contains an additional gene conferring resistance to the antibiotic ampicillin, an antibiotic used in human and animal medicine. The presence of the gene is revealed by the scientific review, “Nature”. In an opinion published in April 2004, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) felt that the use of genes conferring resistance to antibiotics such as ampicillin should be restricted to experimental crops and banned among marketed GMOs.