BRUSSELS––Trade associations representing the animal health, bio tech, chemical, cosmetic, pesticide, pharmaceutical, and soap and detergent sectors on November 11, 2005 signed a pledge to jointly seek alternatives to animal testing. The agreement was brokered by European commissioners for enterprise and research Günter Verheugen and Janez Potoènik.
“We do not only wish to reduce animal testing, but also want to bring it to an end in the long run,” declared Verheugen.

The signatories committed themselves to producing an action plan early in 2006, Sebastian Marx of the cosmetics trade group COLIPA told Stephen Pincock of The Scientist. European Union laboratories currently use about 10.7 million animals per year.

“More than half of these are used in research, human medicine, dentistry, and fundamental biological studies,” wrote Pincock. “Another 16 percent are used in production and quality control,” associated with making human health care products. About 10% are used “for toxicology and other types of safety evaluation,” Pincock added.

The new declaration comes 19 years after the European Union adopted a directive calling for the use of alternatives to animal experimentation wherever they exist.

“The timing of the current initiative had a lot to do with another proposed EU directive that could have the opposite effect,” Pincock noted. “That proposal, under debate at the moment, is Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemical Substances, a framework designed to gather better information on chemicals that reached the market before 1981.”

REACH parallels the High Product-ion Volume testing program underway in the U.S. since 1998. If not amended, REACH could potentially require Britain alone to perform tests on as many as 6.5 million animals, British rural affairs minister Alun Michael told Parliament in March 2004.

But British chemical product manufacturers do not seem to be rushing to do the tests––at least not in Britain.

The Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry in April 2005 published figures showing that investment in British-based research dropped from £3.3 billion in 2003 to £3.2 billion in 2003, after years of annual increases.

Home Office data shows that British laboratory use of nonhuman primates declined 12% in 2004. About 70% of the nonhuman primates used in British labs are part of toxicology studies done to test pharmaceuticals. Expecting the trend away from nonhuman primate research to accelerate, Cambridge University in January 2004 cancelled plans to build a new primate lab.

In March 2005 the Academy of Medical Sciences, the Medical Research Council, the Royal Society, and the Wellcome Trust jointly appointed a scientific panel to assess the future of nonhuman primate research in Britain. “Countries such as China, India, and Singapore are increasingly trying to tempt pharmaceutical companies to move their research to their shores,” noted Heather Tomlinson of The Guardian.

The strongest sales point for China and Singapore is that neither nation tolerates militant protest. “Africa’s laboratories are [also] wooing western firms hit by violent protests with the promise of a more comfortable atmosphere,” wrote Mike Pflanz of The Guardian on October 5, 2005. “Tempted by the offer, drug companies are moving their research to Kenya, Gabon, and South Africa.”

Pflanz visited the 200-acre Institute of Primate Research in Nairobi. Founded by paleo-anthropologist Louis Leakey in 1960, to study human evolution through experiments on baboons, the IPR is now moving with the support of the Kenyan livestock ministry to attract investment from European drug makers. “Hundreds of university researchers from Belgium, Sweden, America and Britain have already collaborated with the IPR,” Pflanz reported.

Said IPR director Emmanuel Wango, “Our costs are almost a tenth of those in America and we have a much more comfortable way of working. We have everything you need to work to the same standards, but without people trying to petrol-bomb your family.”

Gasoline bombings of protest targets have come at a rate of about one every other month in Britain during the past several years. British protesters visited the homes of directors and employees of companies involved in research 259 times altogether in 2003, and 158 times during the first nine months of 2004.

Protestors converged on directors and employees’ homes only 11 times during the last quarter of 2004, after Oxford University won a series of injunctions against activists accused of intimidating or harassing staff and construction workers who are building a new animal research complex. The job was suspended for several months in 2004 when the major contractors withdrew due to vandalism and harassment.

Despite the injunctions, police reports of threatening and abusive calls from protesters nearly tripled. Reported property damage by protesters rose from 60 cases in 2002 to 177 in 2004, plus 35 in the first quarter of 2005. “Kenya will benefit from the fallout between scientists and animal rights activists in the U.S. and Europe,” confirmed Arthur Okwemba of the Nairobi newspaper The Nation on October 6, 2005. “Already the IPR is drafting policies that will allow its scientists to work with interested [foreign] parties while ensuring maximum benefits to Kenya, including technology transfer and patent ownership.”

Okwema noted that the IPR is “planning to increase the price of using one baboon” to approximately double the current rate, or about a third of the cost of doing the same experiment in the U.S. The per day cost of keeping a baboon is about 20% of the U.S. cost in Kenya, Okwema found. “In addition to this,” Okwema said, “research institutions can tap cheaper labor in Kenya. A highly trained scientist in Kenya works for 25% or less than the wage commanded by one with similar qualifications in the U.S. or Europe.
“The only reason why many pharmaceutical companies and other research institutions have not taken advantage of this,” according to Okwema, “is because of the poor scientific infrastructure prevailing in some local institutions.” However, Okwema reported, “some [investors] have expressed interest in helping set up high quality laboratories.” “We are not happy about this at all,” commented Kenya SPCA executive director Jean Gilchrist.

The Indian biotech sector has moved even more ambitiously. Near Mumbai, the Indian Council of Medical Research, Council for Scientific & Industrial Research, Department of Science & Technology, and Department of Biotechnolo-gy are collaborating to build the first facility in India dedicated to primate studies, with $3 million worth of help from the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

The in-house breeding colony is to begin receiving monkeys in 2006. The labs, including some devoted to HIV and stem cell research, are to be completed by 2012. “The dedicated primate facility, where new drugs and vaccines can be tested on monkeys, will be of importance to the biotech and pharmaceutical industry,” wrote Kalyan Ray of the Deccan Herald on October 5, 2005. “The Mumbai facility will complement another Indian Council of Medical Research complex near Hyderabad, for which Andhra Pradesh government has already sanctioned lands,” Ray added. “The National Animal Resource Facility,” as the Hyderabad complex is called, “is likely to house cats, dogs, and horses.”

India has strong animal protection laws on paper, but trying to enforce them in labs cost former minister for animal welfare Maneka Gandhi her job in July 2002. The relevant regulations and supervisory structure have since been weakened. India is already among the world leaders in research on human subjects, typically youth of limited education and job prospects but crushing family responsibilities. Often they have little understanding of either the risks they may be taking or their rights.

“Girls in this situation would be pushed into prostitution. Boys abuse their bodies in a different way,” Shah-e-Alam community activist Rafi Malek recently told Radha Sharma and Sachin Sharma of the Times of India.

Brazil, on the other hand, has historically had both weak animal protection laws and weak enforcement––but a September 28, 2005 ruling by Judge Edmundo Lúcio da Cruz of the Brazilian 9th Criminal Court that a chimpanzee was eligible for a writ of habeas corpus may send biotech investment to Africa and Asia if it is not overturned. According to Correio da Bahia writer Ciro Brigham, attorneys Heron José de Santana and Luciano Rocha Santana sought the writ of habeas corpus on behalf of Suica, 23, a chimp resident of the Salvador Zoo, who had exhibited symptoms of depression since the May 2005 cancer death of her companion Geron. Suica died, unfortunately, one day before Judge Cruz issued his verdict.

The Cruz ruling is believed to have been the first in the world in which a judge found a chimpanzee to be close enough kin to humans to deserve human rights. ”It is well known that the penal right to due process is not static, but rather subject to constant change, where new decisions must be adapted to modern times,” Judge Cruz wrote.

Historically, Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America have participated in primate research chiefly as suppliers of specimens, at first mostly captured from the wild. Later, for a combination of conservation reasons and concern that wild-caught monkeys might bring diseases such as Ebola virus into the U.S., the U.S. required that most imported monkeys be captive-bred––but the requirement has been violated in several high-profile cases brought to light chiefly by the International Primate Protection League.

Early attempts to establish primate research labs in economically disadvantaged nations mostly failed, for reasons including local shortages of skilled labor and political instability. Patas monkeys and rhesus macaques taken to Puerto Rico and other Caribbean islands for breeding and research more than 70 years ago escaped to establish occasionally problematic feral colonies.

Now nations with monkeys and growing numbers of educated citizens see renewed opportunity to vault ahead of the developed world in biotechnological research. “We see researchers going offshore as one of the major problems facing primates used in experiments,” editorialized Australian activist Lynette Shanley in the November 2005 Primates Helping Primates newsletter.

“If primate users in Australia want to use large numbers, then their best and cheapest chance is to go offshore. Australia banned the import of wild-caught primates for research 22-23 years ago,” Shanley continued. “No wild-caught primates have been imported in all that time. In the last 15 years only one researcher has imported primates,” funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, “and all these primates were captive born. He stopped importing primates almost three years ago.”

Yet this is far from a victory over primate experimentation, Shanley continued. “Many of the countries that our researchers visit do not have animal welfare laws,” Shanley pointed out. “One could make a case that if researchers are going to use primates, allowing imports is in the primates’ interest. At least in Australia some welfare concerns such as the use of analgesics [to relieve pain] can be insisted upon. In many counties these needs are ignored.

“Also, if researchers go off-shore,” Shanley noted, “and primates are cheap to use in these countries, then the researchers most likely will use more primates than they need to. Again, one could make a case that importing primates for research is in the interests of animal welfare.”

Australia now has monkey breeding colonies at Monash and Melbourne Universit-ies. Australian labs used 311 monkeys in 2003. A new National Primate Breeding & Research Centre, housing up to 600 monkeys, is to open in 2007 at the Monash University Gippsland campus in Churchill.

––M.C.