The End of Animal Testing?
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The End of Animal Testin g? TH E HSU S WORK S WITH SCIENTISTS , GOVERNMENTS , AND CORPORATION S TO PIONEE R METHOD S THA T REPLAC E ANIMA L US EINPRODUCT SAFET Y EVALUATION by ANGELA MOXLEY A hidden cost lurks behind the sweetener in your morning dict effects in people, and that they are simply too inefficient to coffee, the paint on your living room walls, perhaps even the soap meet the high demand for chemical testing. These changes have you use to wash your hands. spurred a revolution that is moving the field toward tests per - At some point in their development, these products or their formed in computer simulations and modern-day petri dishes— raw ingredients may have been applied to the eyes or skin of live developments that could spell the end of animal use in toxicology animals, injected into their bodies, or pumped into their stomachs within two decades. or airways. In tests of potential carcinogens, subjects are given a In conducting conventional animal tests, says Martin substance every day for two years; other tests involve killing preg - Stephens, HSUS vice president of animal research issues, “you nant animals and studying the fetuses. don’t have to know a lot about animals’ biology; you hope that it’s Governments in most developed countries require a battery similar to our own and you just do the test. Whereas now we know of experiments on materials including food additives, drugs and a lot more about human and animal biology, and we can model vaccines, pesticides, and many other chemicals. The results may be things in the test tube that we couldn’t necessarily do 50 years ago.” used to ban potential toxins, formulate standards to protect The old methods are “basically using animals as surrogate workers who handle them, warn certain classes of people such as people,” he says. “We can do better.” pregnant women against taking a drug, or create packaging labels to let consumers know what to do if, for example, the product SUFFERING FOR SHAKY SCIENCE splashes into their eyes. In addition to the often severe suffering inflicted during safety tests, But the real-life applications for some tested substances are which are almost always conducted without pain relief, as trivial as an “improved” laundry detergent, a new eye shadow, or animals used in toxicity testing suffer mental and emotional a copycat drug to replace a profitable pharmaceutical whose patent stress from repeated, often rough handling and nearly constant has expired. confinement. No one knows exactly how many animals suffer each year for While rabbits, guinea pigs, dogs, birds, and fish are used in toxicity testing, but the annual toll is likely in the millions in the toxicity testing, rats and mice are the mammalian species most fre - U.S. alone. Each test consumes dozens to thousands of animals quently experimented on—yet these rodents are exempted from apiece, says Troy Seidle, Humane Society International director even the modest provisions of the Animal Welfare Act, and facili - for research and toxicology; registration of a single pesticide re - ties are not required to report how many they use. quires more than 50 experiments and the use of as many as 12,000 Chosen for their small size, high reproduction rate, and animals. relatively docile nature, rats and mice are too often perceived as But recent years have brought a growing recognition among content in a lab setting; many people mistakenly think the need scientists and government officials that the welfare of animals in for a natural environment has been bred out of them, says laboratories matters to the public, that animal tests often don’t pre - Stephens. But several years ago, a film documenting rats taken humanesociety.org 21 Fear of toxins in products and the environ - get cancer. So what levels should raise ment, combined with the development of alarm? What you find is that at the end of Full-body restraints hold rabbits during the application of a test substance to their eyes—in some cases, for lifesaving substances such as penicillin and the day, there is a gross characterization more than 24 hours following the procedure. the polio vaccine, has led to entrenched where unless results are at one end of the support of animal testing among many sci - extreme or the other, you typically don’t entists and government regulators. have high confidence that people are going But numerous prominent failures over to react the same way.” S U S H the decades have underscored the weak - E Out of 3,000 cancer tests in animals, 53 H T ; Y T nesses of animal tests. Results can vary from T percent identified the tested substances— E G / Z E lab to lab and species to species. Seidle H some as common as acetaminophen—as C N A S points out that birth defect studies in rats I carcinogenic, says Thomas Hartung, di - U Q I S : and rabbits failed to detect the develop - P rector of the Center for Alternatives to O T M O mentally toxic effects of PCBs (industrial R Animal Testing at Johns Hopkins University. F , E G A compounds widely used in the U.S. until a P Hartung says this figure is likely 10 times E T I S O 1979 ban on their manufacture), for ex - P higher than it would be in humans, probably P O . K ample, while cancer tests have missed the C because rats are much more prone to tumors. O T S O T hazards of substances such as asbestos, ben - O Animal testing of pharmaceuticals has F E Most rodents in labs live alone in shoebox-size cages with nothing to do; experiments may leave them in near G A / zene, and cigarette smoke, delaying con - S also provided dubious information. Ninety- constant pain with no relief. B A R K sumer and worker protection measures by L two percent of drugs that pass the animal E A H C I decades in some cases. M testing stage are ultimately abandoned, ac - from a lab and put in an enclosed natural been shown to be distressful. ; R E E V Cancer study results are particularly / cording to a 2004 Food and Drug Adminis - area revealed something different: They im - Animal testing has historically been a H C S I M problematic, says Stephens. Every day for A tration report. Of these, 60 percent caused mediately began digging burrows, building “health-crisis-driven enterprise,” Stephens L F G N two years, animals receive the largest dose A adverse effects in human clinical trials that nests, and creating their own society. says. In the 1930s, a toxin in a mascara G F L O possible that is not immediately sick - W weren’t predicted in animals; the other 40 “There’s a sense that these animals product caused blindness in women : P O The Way Fo rward: Eye Irritat ion T ening, a concentration far higher M percent were found to be ineffective in don’t quite experience the suffering that and one death, leading to the de - O R F , E Sixty-five years after it was devised by toxicologist John Draize, a rabbit test than what people would be ex - G people, despite promising results in animals. other animals can experience. Partly it has velopment of eye irritation tests As many as A P S I remains the standard animal study for measuring eye irritation caused by chemicals H posed to, he says. “These chem - T “That’s 92 percent of drug candidates something to do with their small size, and on rabbits. In the 1950s and . K C O and products. The test substance is put in the rabbit’s eye sac, says Martin Stephens, 12,00 0 icals could be no problem given T down the drain after many years of research, S it has something to do with their stoic de - 1960s, birth defects in babies I / animals die in I Y N vice president of animal research issues for The HSUS, “and the eyelids are held shut so in realistic doses, but when you A development, and investment,” says Seidle. meanor,” says Stephens, noting that rodents born to pregnant women who the testing of a single V A pesticide B A the substance can get on the cornea and all around the eye.” The eyes are rated for S overwhelm the body—the liver, C “It’s a tremendously high attrition rate, have evolved behaviors to hide weaknesses took the drug thalidomide trig - : T I B B irritancy as indicated by redness, ulceration, hemorrhaging, cloudiness, or blindness. the kidney—there can be a kind of A which speaks very poorly of the methods from predators. “They’re not like dogs, who gered new requirements for wide - R ; K C The rabbits are held for up to 21 days and then killed. indirect toxicity just from that,” he says. O that are currently available. So for many of T will let you know what’s going on. So it’s spread reproductive toxicity testing in S I / Z T A leading alternative method uses the corneas of cow eyes left over from the meat Interpretation of the results also poses R the companies, animal testing is just bad for especially sad that these are the animals who animals. And concern about pesticides A W H C industry. The cow eye test and a similar test using chickens’ eyes have been approved problems, Stephens notes. “Some animals S business. It’s costing them way too much, are used the most in the lab—because they resulted in the creation of a laundry list of A R D : in the U.S.