Laboratory experiments endanger animals and humans

By Emily Tolkington, especially for CalMatters

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Guest Comment written by

I’m a wildlife veterinarian specializing in monkeys, so I know there are ways to prevent the recent incident in Mississippi where eight monkeys escaped during transport from a research lab in New Orleans.

Five of the monkeys were killed by the authorities, two others were shot dead and by members of the public only one was recovered alive.

This was not an isolated incident. There have been at least 15 publicly reported monkey escapes in the past two decades transit and directly from the laboratories.

Earlier this year, the California National Primate Research Center at UC Davis was cited by the USDA after a monkey was severely injured by an improperly closed cage.

These incidents demonstrate a pattern of incompetence that harms monkeys and illustrates the risks of infectious disease and injury to those who handle or are exposed to monkeys. They are only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the harm caused by animal testing.

I experienced firsthand the dangers of infectious disease transmission while working with wild, captive and rescued macaques in Southeast Asia. After being bitten by a wild macaque in Malaysia, I was immediately given post-exposure prophylaxis for rabies.

For those of us who capture or transport wild macaques, there is a risk of contracting infectious diseases that they are known to carry, such as herpes B virus, tuberculosis, yersinia pestis (plague), rotavirus and leptospirosis, a blood infection.

Infectious disease research is the most common use of monkeys in taxpayer-funded US laboratories. Research often requires forcibly infecting monkeys with dangerous pathogens and subjecting them to unfortunate and fatal results.

Tulane University’s National Biomedical Research Center — the primate research facility in New Orleans funded by the National Institutes of Health — reports that the escaped monkeys harbor no known pathogens. But veterinary records and autopsy reports have not been released, illustrating the continuing lack of transparency in what goes on behind locked lab doors.

For decades, medical research and product safety testing have subjected monkeys to life in a laboratory. While animals have some superficial similarities to humans, this research is largely useless and ignored biological differences which lead to difficult and rare translation into human biology and clinical utility.

Some of the most common types of monkeys used in research include rhesus macaques and long-tailed macaques. They live in social groups in the wild. For monkeys in laboratories, isolation, transportation, and restraint often lead to a reduction in their immune system’s ability to fight infection and disease and to harmful self-directed behaviors such as self-harm, hair-pulling, and biting on cage bars, which can affect the reliability of experiments.

In place of monkeys, there are a variety of more efficient methods available to researchers. Some federally funded monkey studies examine human nutrition or marijuana use, research that can be and has been conducted with human volunteers.

Researchers are also increasingly turning to human-based methods, called “new approach methodologies,” which use human cells, tissues and data to model human biology and disease more accurately than animals. Such methods as tissue chips, organoids (lab-grown cells that model organs) and artificial intelligence are advancing rapidly and can overcome species-specific barriers.

Governments are beginning to take steps to review the research infrastructures that favor the use of animals. The Netherlands recently passed a budget that includes a five-year phase-out of public funding for Europe’s largest monkey laboratory, while reallocating funds to non-animal research.

Here in the United States, both National Institutes of Health and on Food and Drug Administration have committed to abandoning animal testing.

These changes represent an important change, but if we continue to fund unnecessary and dangerous research using monkeys, the development of new treatments will be delayed and society will be put at risk of deadly zoonoses.

Stopping this research and redirecting funding to human-based methods will ensure that human health research actually benefits people and does not carry harmful risks to humans or animals.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.