News (April 2008)

Around the world..

Good news from the US
At a major science conference in Boston in February, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Environmental Protection Agency announced a 5-year programme to develop non-animal methods for testing chemical and drug safety. Details of the programme, which aims to eliminate live animal use in toxicity tests within ten years, have also been published in the journal Science. This move will resonate around the world, especially in Europe where thousands of chemicals are to be subjected to safety testing under the EU's controversial "REACH" programme.

Korea follows suit
Shortly afterwards, the Korean Food and Drug Administration's National Institute of Toxicological Research (NITR) announced that it too would actively seek alternatives to animal testing through cooperation with other Asian countries, in preparation for the EU ban on animal-tested cosmetics from 2009.

Advances in humane education
There have been further successes for InterNICHE, the International Network for Humane Education, which has now signed agreements with six Russian higher education institutes, including Moscow University and Tomsk Agricultural Institute, to end the dissection of animals in favour of sophisticated software.
A similar agreement has been reached at a university in Gujurat, India, where InterNICHE has helped to promote humane education initiatives from local teachers, organising training events and distributing alternative tools across India.
In the US, campaigning by humanitarian groups including the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has led to a rethink at New York Medical College, the last medical school in New York to persist in using live animals. From now on, cardiology experiments on live dogs will be replaced with new heart-simulating technology.

Latest alternatives search engine goes online
A new knowledge-based search engine: http://www.go3r.org/ has been developed in Germany to allow scientists all over the world to access alternatives to animal testing much more quickly and efficiently. Go3R was developed by the Dresden-based company Transinsight in cooperation with scientists from the Technical University of Dresden and the National German Centre for Documentation and Evaluation of Alternatives to Animal Experiments (ZEBET) at the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment in Berlin.

In the UK..

MoD ends goat experiments
At home, more needless animal suffering was ended as the MoD pledged the immediate cessation of its controversial goat experiments. After decades of forcing the animals into hyperbaric pressure chambers to induce decompression sickness, or "the bends", the MoD finally responded to protests and agreed to switch to alternative methods such as computer modelling and safe human trials.

Another BUAV court victory
On 30th January a tribunal ruled that the government has been unlawfully withholding details of the animal experiments it licenses in the UK. A court case came about when the Home Office refused to give the BUAV basic information about licences to experiment on animals under the Freedom of Information Act (FOI). This is a key victory in the BUAV's campaign to persuade the government to be open and transparent about animal experiments, following a High Court ruling last year that it had misled the public by licensing experiments that would clearly cause 'substantial' suffering as 'moderate'.

Home Office consulting on animal testing statistics
The importance of public pressure and campaigning was again thrown into relief by the news that government ministers are currently considering reducing the amount of information Britain collects and publishes on its animal experiments to minimal EU standards, against advice from its own Animal Procedures Committee. The move is strongly opposed by groups such as the Dr Hadwen Trust, whose Science Director Dr Gill Langley warns: "If Britain undertakes this drastic pruning of information, it will make it more difficult to monitor laboratory animal suffering and to assess the impact of government policies, such as the replacement of animal tests with alternative methods. The government claims to be committed to ultimately ending animal experiments; this is a critical litmus test of that commitment."

UK stores back cruelty-free initiatives
After switching to cruelty-free cosmetics last year, Marks & Spencer's have now also signed up to the BUAV's Humane Household Products Standard. This follows the earlier example of the Co-op, which is planning in-store promotions in support of the BUAV campaign. An Early Day Motion has now also been tabled in Parliament calling on the government to "implement a policy prohibition on issuing licences to test household products and their ingredients on animals as a matter of urgency".

Blakemore calls for "more sophisticated debate" on animal research
Speaking at an event to mark the centenary of the outspokenly pro-vivisection Research Defence Society, the organisation's new chairman Colin Blakemore made a surprising but welcome case for a more nuanced approach to animal research. The former MRC chief executive said it was time to enter a "new phase" of discussion, recognising that the benefits of animal testing were uncertain, and encouraging a critical assessment of the value of animal models and the scope for alternatives.
We couldn't agree more, Professor Blakemore!