Pigs Spared Med School Surgeries
| Thu May. 8, 2008 1:24 PM PDT
NatureNews reports how doctors used to practise surgery on animals before being allowed to work on patients. Nowadays only a handful of US med schools maintain animal labs. The Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Ohio will shut its live-animal lab this month. Next semester, instead of practising on anaesthetized pigs, its med students will use technologies like virtual simulations. It's all part of a general phase-out of animal labs across the US. In 1994 live-animal experiments were on the curriculum in 77 of 125 medical schools. Now as few as eight use them.
Cost is a factor in the change, since it's expensive to maintain animals and veterinary staff. But simulations have also developed impressively in the past decade. The most advanced simulators now have 'haptic feedback,' providing the sensation that the students' instruments are touching real tissue—advances that make the use of live animals gratuitous, according to John Pippin, a cardiologist in Dallas who once used live dogs to study heart attacks but now works for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. The group continues its work to convince the 6% of US institutes that still use live animals to change their ways—notably the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. NatureNews reports that Jonathan Lissauer, a doctor recently trained at Johns Hopkins, says that sometimes animal surgeries were used "as just a diversion for people who won't be using those skills at all. I think then you cross the territory from appropriate medical education to something worse than that. There was no medical utility in having pigs die so that people going into psychiatry could play around."
According to Erin Williams and Margo DeMello in their compelling treatise on how animals suffer in institutional settings, Why Animals Matter: The Case for Animal Protection, the switch from live-animal experiments to simulations was driven in large part because "medical students around the country expressed reservations about killing animals as part of their education, and many refused to participate in dog labs and other classes in which animals were killed…" Could this be a way to identify the compassionate docs from the not so compassionate?
Julia Whitty is Mother Jones' environmental correspondent, lecturer, and 2008 winner of the Kiriyama Prize and the John Burroughs Medal Award. You can read from her new book, The Fragile Edge, and other writings, here.
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Comments
Actually Chris, I don't think it's up to you to determine what we are created to be. Humans can be omnivores. They can also be herbivores.
And we can evolve, you know.
Regarding our moral evolution, one day people will look upon the eating of animals as an unimaginable horror.
Disagree?
Well, one day people will be appalled that we in the United States feed more than 70% of our wheat, corn and other grains to livestock, while billions in the world are malnourished and underfed.
And meat-eaters are responsible for the production of animal waste?about 86,000 pounds per second?that pollutes our water, ruins or topsoil, and contaminates our air.
The most important step you can take to save the planet is to go vegetarian.
Actually Chris, I don't think it's up to you to determine what we are created to be. Humans can be omnivores. They can also be herbivores.
And we can evolve, you know.
Regarding our moral evolution, one day people will look upon the eating of animals as an unimaginable horror.
Disagree?
Well, one day people will be appalled that we in the United States feed more than 70% of our wheat, corn and other grains to livestock, while billions in the world are malnourished and underfed.
And meat-eaters are responsible for the production of animal waste?about 86,000 pounds per second?that pollutes our water, ruins or topsoil, and contaminates our air.
The most important step you can take to save the planet is to go vegetarian.
I'm glad the pigs are being spared and I hope all experiments on animals are phased out. Also people should go vegan and stop eating animals. Then they'd be healthier and wouldn't need all those heart surgeries and bypasses and liposuction and tummy tuck operations.
People are not created to be vegans - we are omnivores. And just being a vegan won't spare you from being overweight and/or sick. That's false confidence in a philosophy. Plus, genetics plays a huge role in what you should optimally eat.
Actually Chris, I don't think it's up to you to determine what we are created to be. Humans can be omnivores. They can also be herbivores.
And we can evolve, you know.
Regarding our moral evolution, one day people will look upon the eating of animals as an unimaginable horror.
Disagree?
Well, one day people will be appalled that we in the United States feed more than 70% of our wheat, corn and other grains to livestock, while billions in the world are malnourished and underfed.
And meat-eaters are responsible for the production of animal wasteabout 86,000 pounds per secondthat pollutes our water, ruins or topsoil, and contaminates our air.
The most important step you can take to save the planet is to go vegetarian.
RW--Your impression is simply not true. There is in fact no procedure or experiment that cannot be performed on an animal should a scientist deem it necessary. Mice, rats, and birds, which make up about 98% of animals used in research, are not included under animal welfare act provisions. At all. Regulations applicable to them are suggested for NIH-funded studies, but it is exceedingly rare for universities to be punished by NIH for violations of these rules. If these animals are not being used in NIH-funded studies, there are simply no binding regulations applicable to, or ways to even track, what could happen to them. For NIH-funded studies and those using animals protected under the Animal Welfare Act, an IACUC (institutional review committee) reviews studies, and gives investigators much leeway in experimental design, including exemptions from animal welfare act regulations. Because the IACUC is made up of mostly other scientists who are comfortable with or even perform animal experiments, and one or two public members without any scientific experience, some IACUCs approach rubber-stamp status. As part of a justification for using animals, the Animal Welfare Act requires that investigators look for alternatives first. Often what occurs is a half-hearted keyword search on PubMed or MedLine. Even if there is an alternative, the USDA may not force them to use it. Finally, over the last few years, literally hundreds of animals, including primates, dogs, rats, mice, hamsters, and rabbits have died in negligent, preventable accidents--such as being scorched to death by chemicals in cage-washing machines, or dying of dehydration and heat exhaustion when the heat switches on instead of the air conditioning in the middle of the summer. None of the universities or drug companies at which these incidents happened were penalized. In terms of protection for animals in laboratories, the US offers the bare minimum and is far behind Europe in every measure.
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