Is This Medical Science at It’s Best?
by Dr. Aysha Akhtar, Co-founder & CEO
This week, a Twitter trending topic is the allegation, based on a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, of cruel experiments on puppies funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). According to the FOIA documents, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases spent $1.68 million of our tax dollars on vaccine tests involving beagle puppies. Researchers enclosed the dogs’ heads in devices in which they were subjected to repeated bites from parasite-carrying sandflies. The researchers also allegedly cut the dogs’ vocal cords to silence their cries.
The picture of this experiment is quite alarming and evokes more horror than any Halloween movie could. I wish I could say that this experiment is an exception to the rule, but the more we peel back the veil of secrecy that shrouds animal experimentation, the more we learn that cruelty to animals is part and parcel of animal testing. The Animal Welfare Act (AWA) is the only federal law that regulates the use of animals in testing. But it excludes most animals used. Mice, rats, birds, invertebrates, and all non-mammals are not considered animals under the AWA. Importantly, even for the minority of animals which are covered, the AWA provides no limitation on what can and arguably has been done to animals in the name of research, no matter the degree of pain and suffering. In 2019, of the few species which are covered under the AWA, about 225,00 animals were classified as experiencing pain. Additionally, almost 50,000 of these animals, including dogs, cats, rabbits, and nonhuman primates suffered pain and were not provided any pain relief because the experimenters felt that it would interfere with their study objectives.
One cannot help but ask if these experiments are truly the best that science has to offer. Shouldn’t we be long past the days when Thomas Edison electrocuted live dogs to display alternating currents? Science cannot exist in an ethical vacuum. As we now are coming to reckon with how our activities affect the planet and our climate, we need to also ask ourselves hard questions about the ethics of animal experimentation.
In particular, we need to ask if animal testing is the best use of our research dollars. According to a 2012 National Research Council report, almost half of NIH’s funding is for testing that involves animal use, and this amount has remained stable over the years. But NIH’s funding strategy hasn’t caught up with the science. We now know how poor animal testing is in informing human health and predicting whether a drug or vaccine will be safe and effective in humans. Instead of funding one cruel animal experiment over another, the NIH should instead be using our tax dollars to fund more human-relevant methods like organ on a chip technology. But many academic researchers using human-relevant testing methods are telling me that when they apply for NIH grants, they are told that they should be doing animal testing instead. Isn’t it past time that NIH shifts its funding priorities? Our tax dollars should be used to develop, improve, and use more human-relevant testing methods. Not only could these methods better inform human health than animal testing, but they also don’t involve hurting little animals.
