Emily Trunnell,
AlterNet.org
September 2017
The university has received over $1.4 million in federal funding for experiments that won't ultimately help humans. An eyewitness investigation has found that the University of Pittsburgh is using taxpayer dollars to conduct cruel tests on mice, in which the animals suffer long and painful deaths—even after a landmark study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that such tests would not ultimately benefit sick humans.
Photo Credit: Steven Maltby/Shutterstock
Here's a thought experiment: You sit on an oversight committee at a
respected university. A faculty member wants approval for experiments that
he'd like to conduct. He explains that the animals in these taxpayer-funded
studies will suffer a degree of pain that is considered extreme even by
animal experimentation standards. You then find out that the results will
not be applicable to human health. In other words, sick people won't be
helped by them.
Logically, at that point, you would get out your “Rejected” stamp.
But when confronted with this very same situation, the University of
Pittsburgh gave the go-ahead.
So a Pitt researcher is now puncturing the intestines of mice so that fecal
matter leaks into their bodies, producing a condition known as sepsis—a
serious reaction to severe infection. Documents obtained by PETA reveal that
the experimenter will use 860 mice over a three-year period and suggest that
the mice may not receive adequate post-operative pain relief. As they slowly
die, these mice will experience acute pain, fever, chills, and difficulty
breathing.
We’re paying for this cruelty. The National Institute of General Medical
Sciences is giving the experimenter over $1.4 million in taxpayer dollars
for this project.
Each year, there are more than 1 million new cases of sepsis in the U.S.
Up to half of those patients will not live. Better treatments are needed,
but no one is going to find them by experimenting on mice.
In 2013, a landmark study published in the journal Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences concluded that the results of sepsis
experiments on mice can't be applied to humans because the genetic responses
of mice to sepsis were "close to random in matching their human
counterparts." Close to random.
The study, which took a decade to complete and involved dozens of
researchers, was so noteworthy that Francis Collins, the director of the
National Institutes of Health, wrote an article about it. He lamented the
"150 drugs that successfully treated this condition in mice" that "later
failed in human clinical trials—a heartbreaking loss of decades of research
and billions of dollars," adding, "No wonder drugs designed for the mice
failed in humans: they were, in fact, treating different conditions!"
That's why Pitt's sepsis experiments are pointless. Here's why they're
cruel: A PETA eyewitness investigation found that the septic mice were left
to languish in agony, eventually becoming so sick that they were unable to
move. One veterinarian who worked in this laboratory observed that they were
"falling over dead."
Pitt's Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC)—the federally
mandated oversight body charged with stopping fiascos like this one before
they start—approved these experiments. Its members failed the public by
green-lighting experiments that are costing taxpayers and aren't going to
help anyone. They've also failed the animals in the experiments who suffer
needlessly. The IACUC hasn't even managed to ensure that Pitt experimenters
adhere to protocols stipulating when an animal must be euthanized in order
to avoid "unnecessary" suffering.
The authors of the 2013 sepsis study had a recommendation for researchers:
Step away from the mice and instead focus on human-relevant methods of
sepsis research.
There may have already been a breakthrough on that front.
A few physicians have recently had impressive results by treating sepsis
patients with intravenous vitamin C, although more studies are needed to
confirm the efficacy of this therapy.
Good thing this wasn't first tried in mice. Mice, unlike humans, make
their own vitamin C, and giving them more doesn't significantly change their
circulating levels. So vitamin C would likely have had no beneficial effect
on them.
The treatment would have been dismissed as ineffective—a mistaken
conclusion, just like in the case of those 150 drugs that were deemed a
success because they did work in mice but then failed to help human sepsis
patients.
It's time for Pitt and other laboratories to take that advice about leaving
the mice in peace and instead adopting animal-free methods of research that
hold out real hope for patients.
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