animal testing
kkrisberg | March 3, 2016In the U.S., just a tiny fraction of the chemicals used in consumer products have been tested for human health effects. And with the current climate in Congress, it feels unlikely that we’ll see any true reform of the nation’s terribly outdated chemical safety rules anytime soon. In the meantime, scientist Thomas Hartung may have created the next best thing.
In the simplest terms, Hartung and colleagues took what is the world’s largest and richest database of chemical toxicity research — a database produced in accordance with the European Union’s Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and…
amillikan | April 23, 2009
Hundreds of research supporters rallied on UCLA's campus Wednesday to protest acts of terrorism directed at scientists by animal rights activists. The event, organized by the UCLA chapter of Pro-Test, a group founded in Oxford, England to support animal testing for the pursuit of science, drew an estimated 800 people to the rally. A simultaneous anti-research rally only drew about 30 people. For continued discussion on the rally, ScienceBlogger DrugMonkey has an open discussion thread on his blog.
Related ScienceBlogs Posts:
Scientists and Supporters Rally Against Animal Rights Extremism at…
amillikan | March 9, 2009In an opinion piece published in the Huffington Post Wednesday, a woman dying of leukemia vehemently spoke out against animal testing in medicine, positing that scientists might have found a cure for her condition by now if "they weren't sidetracked by misleading animal tests." While acknowledging the unfortunate nature of the woman's situation, ScienceBloggers are criticizing her stance that animal trials are not beneficial or are somehow to blame for the woman's sickness, asserting the necessity of using animal models for drug research and reinforcing that researchers must proceed in ways…
angrytoxicologist | December 10, 2008Back in March in Toxicological Sciences there was a great LTE from Dr David Basketter regarding an in vitro sensitization assay. The part I thought most on the money was this:
Overall, a prediction accuracy of about 82% was achieved, which is only a little lower than was obtained during the validation of the local lymph node assay (LLNA) (NIH, 1999), although some might be concerned by the failure of this in vitro system to detect almost 20% of the sensitizers. The authors address this issue by invoking the conduct of complementary assays, such as peptide binding or in silico methods. For…
angrytoxicologist | July 2, 2008ICCVAM authorized two different methods, the bovine corneal opacity and permeability (BCOP) assay and the isolated chicken eye (ICE) assay. These don't use live animals. I'm not exactly sure you could say that this wasn't tested in an animal, but close enough. Or at least that's what the director says. It really don't count as a reduction, but it certainly counts as refinement. As I'm always going on about, this is really a boon for drug and pesticide development and does nothing for risk assessment. Even in the press release (link above), it notes (thankfully):
If a positive response is…
angrytoxicologist | April 18, 2008I'm waiting around for a meeting (about animal testing!) and thought I'd share a few things that I've been thinking about.
1) While we're not going to stop using animals for testing in a long time it is a good idea to reduce them where we can and where industry and the public (at-large; I know industry is the public, too) can agree one should strike when the iron is hot - even when the reasons are really different.
2) Will the use of this alternative method increase the number of animals later? If refined models don't provide adequate information or aren't accurate enough, you'll end up…
laelaps | November 2, 2007Mark of SB's own Denialism Blog has asked other science bloggers who use animals in their research to speak up and discuss what they do either in their own posts in the comments. I do not participate in lab research involving animals, but I have taken an interest in the subject, especially when non-human primates are used. While I don't doubt the importance of animal testing, I do have reservations about the ethics of using non-human primates in medical research. This is not to say that I advocate the acts of terrorism by extremists as related in Mark's posts, but I do have concerns about…