Our work, in tandem with congressional and federal agency actions, may usher in a new era of health and well-being for people and for animals As the U.S. military newspaper Stars and Stripes reported in late December, Congress included a provision in a larger bill related to the military to end “exercises that involved shooting, … Read more
Critical vote strengthens momentum for human-relevant science and overdue regulatory reform Last night, the U.S. Senate passed the FDA Modernization Act 3.0, S. 355, signaling to the Food and Drug Administration that it must wind down the era of animal testing in drug development and boldly enter the era of screening drugs by methods grounded in human … Read more
Along with the new leaders of our public health agencies, we’ve been calling for a wind-down of testing on primates and dogs Last week, something extraordinary happened within the bowels of a key life sciences agency of the federal government. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has directed its scientists to end all … Read more
The action is one more reverberation from the FDA Modernization Act 2.0 There’s some major movement on the front end of the trade in dogs for use in laboratories. Ridglan Farms, the nation’s second-largest supplier of beagles for laboratory experiments, has agreed to surrender its license to breed and sell dogs for experimentation. This comes … Read more
Today, the U.S. Senate passed the FDA Modernization Act 3.0, S. 5046, to compel the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to get on with the task of winding down the era of animal testing in drug development and boldly enter the era of screening drugs by methods grounded on human biology. The bill passed the … Read more
This will spar animals needlessly conscripted into an outdated and expensive testing scheme with its origins in the Depression era.
There is a desperate need to reduce animal testing and usher in 21st-century science In a game-changing legislative act, Democrat and Republican leaders of the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce have included the FDA Modernization Act as a “rider” to a broader legislative package to reauthorize the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) user-fee … Read more
Please tell your legislators to support the FDA Modernization Act here. Congress has three fundamental responsibilities: pass new legislation, fund the implementation and enforcement of the enacted laws, and establish taxes to pay for them. And that’s the sequence: authorize programs and then implement them. For instance, Animal Wellness Action (AWA) worked to ban animal … Read more
Congress Can Reduce Pointless Animal Testing by Allowing Innovative Safety and Efficacy Non-Animal Methods for Assessing Drug Safety It wasn’t your typical highway crash. Surely, there was a dazed and injured driver after his speeding truck flipped on a four-lane highway. But the truck had a very large group of passengers in the rear. Nearly … Read more
Last year, deeply disturbing images and descriptions of ghastly tests on beagles for drug development — intentionally infecting them with parasites to test a vaccine in one experiment and cutting their vocal cords to reduce decibel levels because beagles vocalize pain in a separate laboratory exercise – reminded Americans about the painful cost of animal … Read more
The FDA Modernization Act is a Key Part of the Solution Deeply disturbing images and descriptions of ghastly tests on beagles — intentionally infecting them with parasites to test a vaccine in one experiment, cutting their vocal cords to reduce decibel levels because beagles vocalize pain in a separate laboratory exercise, and euthanizing the animals … Read more
Proponents of civil society no longer accept the moral premise that’s it’s okay to conduct painful or harmful experiments on their human brethren without their consent or understanding, even if insights we’d glean from them could in theory benefit the larger community. The Tuskegee experiments that started in the 1930s and persisted through the early … Read more
FDA Modernization Act Can Deliver Game-Changing Results for Patients and for Animals Since 1938, the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act (FFDCA) has required animal testing for new drugs. In every and all cases. Hard stop. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) religiously requires the use of animals in testing even when its own scientists … Read more
The race to develop a COVID-19 vaccine, with the runners sent down the wrong path by the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) archaic animal-testing regulatory requirements, is putting wild animals through a sort of meat grinder in our laboratories. Researchers may kill upwards of 500,000 sharks for a single moon-shot vaccine, while hundreds of other … Read more
With COVID-19 Surging Across the Country, No Time to Waste on Revamping Drug Development Regulations There are 536 counties in the U.S. with COVID-19 case densities that are equal to or exceeding New York City’s peak in April. Our national crisis has not only been severe, but enduring. What started as mainly a respiratory virus, … Read more
COVID-19 has infected 1.5 million people, with that number to swell before the virus’s person-to-person global hopscotching pauses. In response, scientists in laboratories are racing to develop a vaccine and therapies to arrest its progress and to palliate its worst effects. But the race between the scientists and the virus is rigged. The virus had … Read more