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June 16, 2009

Lousy animal rights reporting

From The Economist:

Some 12m animals are used in scientific procedures each year in Europe. Most are mice and rats.

Suffering for science
For sure this is wrong. Fish, worms, and flies are all animals and are vastly more numerous in use as animal test subjects. They probably mean mammals or animals requiring IRB clearance and not animals. I would imagine that an average fly lab has well over one million flies at any one time and they only live a couple of weeks.

The European Commission said in November 2008 that it wanted to update the rules to better protect laboratory animals throughout Europe. ...
In particular, the politicians decided against an outright ban on the use of great apes. Instead they voted to allow such experiments only when they are intended to conserve the number of chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orang-utans, or when using these species becomes essential to tackling a disease that threatens people. In practice, no great apes have been used in Europe for years and there are no breeding colonies from which to take them.

I'm surprised this doesn't get more coverage. When Americans wanted to protect human suffering by restricting stem cells, they were mocked by many for over-weighting some abstract sense of suffering over obvious human suffering. The high standards of these European IRB must cause good research to be left undone, or to be done sub-optimally. That means more money wasted and more people suffering than necessary.

Sharing information freely should help to reduce the number of animals scientists use. Today they usually publish the results of their research only if they are positive, but if there is more data about negative results, scientists are less likely to repeat experiments needlessly.

Or it could do the opposite. No one is talking about reducing the number of scientists. By reducing duplication of effort and keeping the number of scientists constant, it raises the likelihood that the research is fruitful. More fruitful research means more funding and more interesting experiments, leading to more animals being experimented upon. Alternatively, greater information sharing means that there is increased pressure not to be scooped, leading to even more duplicated experiments as scientists race to be first.

Posted by OneEyedMan at June 16, 2009 3:22 PM

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