Articles and Letters
Letter on Animal Experimentation
People may find this hard to believe, but our
government is still spending millions of dollars a year to fund cruel
and outdated experiments on animals to test the effects of nicotine and,
even though we know that answers won't come from animal studies like the
following:
- At Oregon Health and Science University, pregnant
monkeys are given steady doses of nicotine through pumps implanted
into their backs, then the babies are cut out of their mothers'
wombs and their lungs are dissected.
- At Texas A&M University, baby rats are forced to
consume nicotine mixed with baby formula at the equivalent of three
packs of cigarettes a day. After a week of being fed nicotine, the
babies' heads are cut off and their brains are dissected.
- At the University of California, pregnant rhesus
monkeys are subjected to smoking chambers and forced to inhale
cigarette smoke for six hours each day, five days a week. When the
infants are ten weeks old, they are killed by lethal injection and
their lungs are dissected for analysis.
In the past five years, the National Institutes of
Health (NIH) has given more than $16 million to this research, but that
figure does NOT reflect the total cost of all nicotine research on
animals.
Animal researchers defend these experiments as
necessary for improving maternal and newborn health; however, after
decades of animal studies, we still have not solved the problem of
smoking during pregnancy. Only education, public health outreach, and
prevention programs can address the human behaviors that lead to
smoking.
The NIH should stop funding nicotine experiments on
animals and instead redirect funds towards prevention, education and
smoking cessation programs.
Sent in by Shemirah Brachah
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