Justin Goodman, Nathan Heschler / Independent Media Institute, as posted
on AlterNet.org
August 2018
Ending archaic, inhumane animal testing is something on which both parties—and most Americans—can agree.... National polls conducted by Lincoln Park Strategies have recently found that 79 percent of Republicans and 68 percent of Democrats want to cut EPA spending on animal tests, and that three-quarters of all voters think federal agencies should be required to replace animal tests with high-tech alternatives whenever possible.
Congress recently pressed the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
on its “questionable” and “dubious” animal tests. The lawmakers’ demand for
information on “horrific and inhumane” animal testing at the EPA comes on
the heels of a recent Johns Hopkins University study that found that
high-tech computer models are more effective than animal tests.
But as scientists and elected officials are coming to the same conclusions
about the inefficacy and unethical nature of animal testing, the US
government is still wasting tens of millions of taxpayer dollars and
countless animals’ lives for archaic experiments opposed by most Americans.
Now lawmakers have an opportunity to stop it, as Congress is currently
debating federal agency budgets for 2019.
Recently, White Coat Waste Project, a watchdog group committed to ending
taxpayer-funded animal experiments, uncovered how a little-known EPA program
abuses approximately 20,000 animals annually in outdated air pollution
experiments. The tests at the EPA’s National Health and Environmental
Effects Research Laboratory include making animals obese by feeding them
lard and then forcing them to inhale diesel exhaust and smog to study the
effects. In other tests, animals were blasted with loud noises and exposed
to ozone, pregnant animals were stressed with light and noise and their
babies were given electric shocks.
Following the exposé, our organizations, the White Coat Waste Project and
the New England Anti-Vivisection Society, along with more than 55,000
Americans, urged Congress to cut funding for these tests and support more
productive EPA programs focused on alternatives to animal tests like robotic
testing systems and organs-on-chips that the EPA has acknowledged can make
testing more cost-effective, accurate and efficient. Yet, a lack of
transparency and accountability about the EPA’s animal testing and efforts
to curb it has prevented much-needed scrutiny, until now.
To their credit, several Republican and Democratic lawmakers quickly sprang
into action to address this waste and abuse.
In a recent letter to the EPA, Congressmembers Matt Gaetz (R-Florida), David
Cicilline (D-Rhode Island), Dan Donovan (R-New York), Steve Cohen
(D-Tennessee), Scott Perry (R-Pennsylvania) and Brendan Boyle
(D-Pennsylvania)—lawmakers who are often publicly at odds on other policy
issues—demanded details on the EPA’s testing, writing, “These tests likely
cost taxpayers millions of dollars each year, and their relevance to humans,
as EPA has often acknowledged, is dubious at best.”
The same day, the House of Representatives passed language championed by
Reps. Ken Calvert (R-California), David Joyce (R-Ohio) and Debbie Wasserman
Schultz (D-Florida) in the EPA’s 2019 funding bill, urging the agency to do
more to reduce its animal tests and focus on high-tech alternatives to
animal testing.
This is important progress, but sadly the EPA is not the only problematic
agency using wasteful 100-year-old testing methods to guide 21st-century
public health policy.
In May, the Waste Project and the Anti-Vivisection Society released a report
titled “Toxic Testing” exposing hundreds of wasteful government animal tests
by the National Toxicology Program. The report found that recent Program
tests used more than 115,000 animals and 186 million taxpayer dollars, and
that high-tech and cost-effective alternatives to animal testing are
woefully underused.
One of the outlandish animal testing series documented included 25 million
taxpayer dollars and 10 years spent to blast 3,000 animals with cellphone
radiation equivalent to 10 iPhones all day, every day, for two years before
killing and dissecting them. At the study’s conclusion, the National
Toxicology Program told The Washington Post, “Given the inconsistent pattern
of the findings, the fact that the subjects were rats and mice rather than
people and the high level of radiation used, [the study] could not
extrapolate from the data the potential health effects on humans.” Of
course, this information was obvious prior to conducting the research, but
they proceeded anyway.
In another troubling set of at least 36 different tests costing around $5
million, the Program force-fed and injected thousands of animals with
acrylamide, a by-product in coffee and French fries using, as the National
Institutes of Health put it, “doses 1,000 to 10,000 times higher than the
levels people might be exposed to in foods.” Based on these inherently
flawed rodent tests, the Program concluded that acrylamide can “reasonably
be anticipated to be a human carcinogen.”
Yet, the National Cancer Institute—which, like the National Toxicology
Program, resides within the Institutes of Health—reports, “a large number of
epidemiologic studies … in humans have found no consistent evidence that
dietary acrylamide exposure is associated with the risk of any type of
cancer.” Similarly, the American Cancer Society states that “there are
currently no cancer types for which there is clearly an increased risk
related to acrylamide intake.”
The public health and policy impacts of this misleading animal testing are
significant. Based on animal tests of acrylamide by the Program and others,
a California court ruled that Starbucks and other coffee sellers must now
include cancer warnings on coffee cups, despite there being no evidence of
health risks in humans.
This is an issue that bridges the growing left-right divide. Consider the
fact that Pulitzer-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald recently retweeted an
article from the conservative Daily Caller about the EPA’s animal testing,
writing, “Disgust and opposition to horrific government experiments on
animals is not only growing rapidly, but is becoming bipartisan and
trans-ideological.” He’s right. National polls conducted by Lincoln Park
Strategies have recently found that 79 percent of Republicans and 68 percent
of Democrats want to cut EPA spending on animal tests, and that
three-quarters of all voters think federal agencies should be required to
replace animal tests with high-tech alternatives whenever possible.