Testing for toxins: environmental and humane groups seek alternatives to animal tests

E: The Environmental Magazine, Feb, 1994 by Leslie Pardue

To an outsider, environmentalists and animal rights advocates would appear natural allies. But one basic philosophical difference divides the two schools of though: to the extent that environmental organizations work on animal issues, they tend to emphasize the health and viability of animal species, populations and habitat; animal rights advocates, on the other hand, concern themselves more with the well-being of individual animals and work on issues dealing with individual animal suffering and pain.

While may people would place themselves squarely in both camps, arguing that concern for the welfare of individual animals is inseparable from environmental concerns, many environmental organizations prefer to distance themselves from animal rights group which they view as misanthropic, tunnel-visioned, sensational in approach, and anti-science.

Portraying animal rights advocacy as "shrieking," "a religion" and "a one-note samba," Margaret L. Knox, writing in the May/June 1991 issue of Buzzworm, warns environmentalists to not allow their message to be diluted by the animal rights viewpoint, "lest the ever-elusive big picture doesn't get miniaturized into portraits of battered puppy dogs." In the April/May 1993 issue of Garbage, Bill Breen does little to tone down the rhetoric. Articulating the mainstream view, he labels as "terrorist" the clandestine Animal Liberation Front (ALF) (which has raided and vandalized animal testing laboratories to call attention to their concerns), while pointing out that a host of current environmental laws - the Clean Air and Water Act, Superfund legislation and many Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations - were in fact formulated using animal test data. While acknowledging that some animal tests, such as the Lethal Dose 50 Percent (LD50) and the Maximum Tolerated Dose (MTD), may yield results that are statistically invalid and difficult to extrapolate to humans, he nevertheless concludes, "Though imperfect, in most tests the mouse ramains the best model for man."

Dr. Kenneth Olden is director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences which direct animal toxicology studies for the federal government. In a March 23, 1993 New York Times article ("Animal Tests As Risk Clues: The Best Data May Fall Short"), Dr. Olden questions the billions of dollars spent each year regulating chemicals that may pse little health or environmental risk. Indeed, scientists are questioning regulations governing such chemicals as dioxin, DDT, saccharin and cyclamates, which have produced cancers in some lab animal test but may not be as harmful to humans. Institute officials estimate that between one-third and two-thirds of substances deemed to be carcinogenic as a results of MTD test in rodents would be benign in humans at normal doses. "Quite often," reports the Times, "that means no one takes the Institute's warnings seriously anymore." A panel appointed by Olden concluded that, rather than relying solely on animal test data to determine health risks to humans, government should redirect its efforts toward cell cultures and epidemiological studies on human populations that have accidentally experienced chemical exposure.

Although not all animal welfare organizations favor the abolition of animal testing, most agree that many such tests could - and should - be replaced by alternative techniques. "Animal tests have a host of problems besides animal suffering associated with them," says Dr. Martin Stephens of the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). "They're expensive, time consuming and often have dubious applicability to humans. There are so many species to test on, and so many doses that can be administered, that scientists can theoretically come up with whatever results they're looking for." Many alternatives, he argues, are often quicker, cheaper and more accurate.

Environmental organizations currently rely on data from animal test when trying to prove a chemical to be harmful to the environment. But Stephens points to Corrosistex, which chemically assesses the toxicity of often-transported chemical; Fetek, which uses tadpoles instead of rodents to measure fetal abnormalities; and TopKat, a computer program that assesses toxicity based upon comparisons with hundreds of other already-tested chemicals. "Scientists should avail themselves of such alternatives and environmentalists should see that more are developed," says Stephens.

However, many alternatives have not yet been validated by the scientific community. Animal advocate Henry Spira interviewed in the newsletter of the Foundation for Biomedical Research (FBR), comments, "A lot of the block have nothing to do with science but with regulatory requirements and bureaucratic inertia... there comes a point where you have to stop disigning and start shipping."

Toward that end, Spira advocates challenging "creeping routinism." "Institutions should be called upon the examine animal research activities "from ground zero, so that people do not mindlessly repeat what was done in previous years... People and institutions tend to do tomorrow what they did yesterday," argues Spira. "Before any laboratory animals are used we must ask, 'Is this research really necessary? Can this information be obtained without using animals With fewer animals? With less pain?" Spira advocates the adoption of the "Three Rs": replacement of animal tests, reduction in the numbers animals used (currently some 20 million annually in the U.S.), and refinement of experimental procedures so as to lessen animal suffering.