More Protection For Lab Animals?

Options More Protection For Lab Animals? AUTHOR: ARTHUR C. GUYTON Date: May 30, 1988 Unnecessary Rules Are Already Strangling Medical Research In the past few years, attacks on medical research by animal "welfare" groups have become vicious, even violent. Their tactics are clearly paying off. The costs of using animals in medical research have soared. Even more chilling, allowable procedures for using animals are becoming so restrictive that research now takes far more time, energy, and intellectual effort than it did even a few years ago. While medical research using animals has not been killed outright, it is slowly bleeding to death. And regulations being proposed will only hasten its demise. Since many lower animals respond to surgical procedures and to medical treatment in much the same way as humans, animal experiments have provided most of the advances throughout the history of medical research. Who in his right mind would have used human beings to develop the heart-lung machine and other life-support procedures in cardiac operations? Who would have given almost any drug presently on the market first to a human being? Think about the tens of thousands of children who developed polio in the 1940s and early 1950s. The development of the polio vaccine depended heavily on monkeys, because only primates are susceptible to the virus. A few hundred monkeys have saved millions of children worldwide from polio. Now comes the AIDS epidemic. Testing a vaccine for effectiveness or safety will almost certainly require experiments with primates. But because of animal-rights groups—and the rules and regulations they have thrust onto scientists—the supply of primates has almost totally dried up. Chimpanzees, the only animal thus far found to be susceptible to AIDS, cost about $6,000 each, assuming that they are even available. Many other animals required for medical research are also becoming unavailable. The reason lies in the rules and regulations established by federal, state, and local laws. Until the last 20 years, for instance, most of the large animals used for medical research were dogs and cats from local animal pounds. These animals were in the pounds because no one wanted them; in fact, a recent survey found that between 10 million and 13 million dogs and cats are put to death each But because animal-welfare organizations have promoted laws that prevent pounds from releasing animals to medical research, very few of these millions of dogs and cats are now available for medical research. And yet they’re put to death anyway. Animal-welfare organizations state in large public pronouncements that they are not against medical research. Instead of using pound animals, they say, scientists should breed animals especially for research. The result is the death of two animals—the pound animal and the one bred for science. This is obviously illogical, but it has the desired result of making the cost of medical research soar. To make matters worse for scientists, the provisions of various laws have been amplified immensely by the subordinate regulatory agencies. The Improved Standards for Laboratory Animals Act passed by Congress in 1985, for example, required the Department of Agriculture to write new regulations for how animals should be treated and how experiments should be controlled and inspected. But when proposed regulations were issued last summer, they went far beyond the specific requirements of the law. Here are some of the rules and regulations that medical researchers are now facing, or may be facing in the near future: " Investigators must apply for and obtain permission from new unviersity animal-care committees to perform each experiment with animals. This sometimes causes delays that can significantly increase the overhead cost of a laboratory. " Sophisticated veterinary care must be provided for all animals that are used in medical research— even though almost all of these animals will be euthanized within a few days to a few weeks. This alone can double the cost of research. " Surgical operations on rabbits and all larger animals can only be performed in a special operating room that costs about a quarter of a million dollars, and must be supervised by a veterinarian. The effect is to eliminate all but the rich research organizations. The situation may be getting even worse. One new proposal of the animals-rights groups would require every investigator to consult a special databank to be established in the Library of Congress on "alternatives" to animal experiments, and then "prove" that no alternative existed before being allowed to go forward. The difficulty with this is that wherever there are alternatives, such as tissue cultures, they are already being used. After all, the alternatives are much easier to work with than larger animals. Indeed, experiments with large animals account for only 2% of the total. U.S. scientists have only to look to Europe to see their own possible future. Perhaps because of a culture that is less pragmatic than ours, Europeans began top restrictive legislation as early as the turn of the century, and now, research using large animals is almost impossible. In Scandinavia, virtually no dogs are now being used for medical research, even though unwanted dogs are still being killed in the name of humaneness. In all of Germany, the head of a major research laboratory recently told me, only three laboratories still perform dog experiments on the cardiovascular system. Even then the dogs must be bred for this purpose at a cost of about $800 each. Most scientists have simply switched to other areas of investigation. The regulations strangling medical research are difficult for scientists to fight. Animal welfare groups are sophisticated, well-financed public relations machines. One U.S. congressmen told me that he receives more mail lobbying for animal-rights bills than he gets on all other issues combined. The organizations also have a remarkable power to spread distortions. Last month, the columnist Ann Landers ran a letter detailing an experiment in which cats had been dropped from tall buildings in New York City to see whether they would survive. As Ann Landers quickly discovered, the writer had been sadiy misinformed the animals had fallen or jumped and had been brought in for treatment. Researchers had determined the extent of injury and published the results, an exceedingly worthwhile study. Many of my colleagues and I have worked hard to stem the regulatory tide. But as medical research workers, we cannot both do our research and fight the animal-rights lobby and its relentless campaign of misinformation. Nor do we have the funds or time to provide an anti-lobby. Therefore, it is now up to the public, and those who make science policy, to decide whether the results of medical research are worth the cost. The use of animals in this research, unfettered by discouraging laws and regulations, is part of this cost. Arthur C. Guyton is chairman of the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Mississippi He is also a member of the Advisory Committee to the director of NIH and a past president of the American Physiological Society.

More Protection For Lab Animals?

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