Posted on behalf of Meera Swami
A recent Nature poll revealed that nearly one in four biologists have been negatively affected by animal-rights activists. Yet that hasn’t led to a reduction in the number of animals used in biomedical research, at least in Britain. According to statistics released today from the UK Home Office, last year saw a record number of animal experiments in the country, with more than 3.7 million animals used for research — a 3% increase from 2009.
The rise in 2010 follows the steady trend over the last 15 years in which more scientific procedures involving animals are being carried out. This can mainly be attributed to the increased usage of genetically modified organisms, as breeding to maintain these lines are counted within the procedures.
Similar to recent years, mice, fish, rats and birds accounted for the majority (97%) of the procedures; only around 0.1% of the studies involved non-human primates.
The number of procedures in fish showed a notable increase of 23% — around 480,000 studies in 2010 compared with some 390,000 the year before. This change partially reflects the increased use of genetically modified zebrafish, especially in developmental studies.
Procedures in non-human primates also increased by 10%, with experiments in new world monkeys such as marmosets — whose blood and tissue are often sampled by pharmaceutical companies for in vitro drug testing — rising by 78% over the previous year. However, the number of individual primates actually used in biological research fell by 6% since more than 2,000 procedures involved reusing some of these animals.
Animal research in the UK is subject to higher standards than most other European countries, and a recent revision of the EU directive published last year seeks to improve and harmonize animal research across the continent. Although there have been fears from animal-rights groups that this move could lead to less stringent regulation of animal usage in the UK, experts claim these fears are unfounded. Rather, they argue that the move by the EU is encouraging, as it recognizes the high standards of the UK animal research as a benchmark.
“The directive will also allow the UK to maintain their higher standards if they differ from those set out in the directive and there are several safeguards in place to ensure that UK standards don’t slip,” Martin Walsh, head of the Home Office Animals Scientific Procedures Division, said at a press conference this morning.
In addition, collaborative measures in the EU to refine animal procedures could also provide an opportunity to produce more informative statistics about animal experimentation in the future. “Rather than just reporting numbers of procedures, we could start reporting the number of procedures in which animals were subject to suffering” said Dominic Wells, a gene therapy researcher at the Royal Veterinary College in London, at the press briefing.