World Laboratory
Animal Liberation Week

World Laboratory Animal Liberation Week is the week that surrounds April 24th every year - It's a national week of protests, media events, etc. at laboratories to stop testing and research on animals

 

The Animal Experimentation Scandal:
An Audit of the National Institutes of Health
Funding of Animal Experimentation

Summary

In summary, it appears that the current system for grant approval has been constituted in such a way as to provide for the approval of almost any grant for an animal experimentation project, with few motivations for a project to be disapproved. The individuals involved in the approval process often have a vested interest in approving grants, with little or no incentive to disapprove grants.

The existing system has led to a steady climb (29,441 projects in target species, a 37.3% increase) in the number of animal experimentation projects funded by the NIH over the last ten years. A conservative estimate of the current annual expenditure for animal based experimentation as it is funded by the National Institutes of Health exceeds $8.5 billion.

56.7% of the facilities examined receive more than $100 million annually for the performance of animal experimentation (see Appendix A for individual facility totals). Since laboratories have a monetary interest in performing as much experimentation as possible, duplication is rampant in the NIH grant system.

Several specific areas of experimentation were examined to study the issue of experimental duplication. More than 170 separate projects study neural information processing in macaque monkeys, with 123 of these studying visual neural information processing. Additionally, 450 NIH grants study cocaine in rats, mice or macaque monkeys potentially using more than $131 million annually (see appendices B – F for actual grant listings). Experimental duplication is evidently very high, leading to the waste of hundreds of millions in federal tax dollars, and the unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands of animals.

A radical restructuring of the NIH grant approval system, and the Institutional Animal Care & Use Committee system is necessary to prevent further waste of federal tax dollars and animal lives.

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