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Despite a commitment to reduce the use of animals in European laboratories by 50 per cent by the year 2000, a new European Union (EU) chemicals policy could kill millions of animals in horrific poisoning tests!
On 29th October 2003, the animal protection community’s
worst fears were realised with the publication of the EU’s final draft
legislation for a new EU Chemicals Policy. This massive plan amounts to
nothing more than a futile data gathering exercise, as thousands of chemicals
that are already in use will be put through a battery of outdated, cruel
and inaccurate animal tests. Instead, new non-animal tests are needed to
gather information on chemicals. Non-animal tests are faster, cheaper and,
above all, an ethically acceptable, modern way forward for chemical assessment.
The following are just a few details of what the EU is proposing:
- Unlike chemical testing efforts in the US—under which members of the public are notified of proposals for new animal testing and given an opportunity to comment––the EU’s legislation would ensure that the public is shut out and that animal testing is conducted secretly.
- Despite its stated ‘requirement’ that animal testing be kept to a minimum, the EU chemicals legislation does not include any sanctions for non-compliance with this provision, as it does for other violations.
- The proposed legislation directs the EU Chemicals Agency to develop appropriate contacts with stakeholder organizations and goes on to list all major stakeholders except the animal protection community.
- There is no specific provision for the use of animal test data that has already been generated in similar schemes in other parts of the world.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV) are campaigning for a more rational approach to chemical testing. We already know that more than 300 synthetic chemicals contaminate the human body, and we believe that efforts to ban or severely restrict these contaminants should be given priority over massive and unfocused efforts to test and retest tens of thousands of common chemicals. As Dr. Joshua Lederberg, Nobel Laureate in Medicine, wrote in 1981: ‘It is simply not possible with all the animals in the world to go through chemicals in the blind way that we have at the present time, and reach credible conclusions about the hazards to human health.’ Now, more than twenty years later, millions of animals are still dying in agonizing chemical toxicity tests, and we are no closer to getting dangerous chemicals out of our environment.
We need your help to convince the EU to implement a chemicals policy that will effectively protect the public and the environment from hazardous chemicals without subjecting animals to hideous suffering in laboratories.
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