Experiments on animals are always cruel and should be ended, wherever they occur. But animals can be tormented in other countries in ways that wouldn’t be done in the U.S.
CARLIN BECKER: The National Institutes of Health [NIH] has hiked spending on animal experiments carried out abroad by almost a quarter in the last two years, sending cash to foreign countries for such purposes as addicting fish to drugs and nicotine, and feeding human feces to rodents, an analysis by taxpayer watchdog White Coat Waste Project has found. The agency spent an estimated $140.3 million on foreign animal research in fiscal year 2020, up from roughly $114 million in 2018, with funding going to studies in at least 29 other countries, reports the project, which aims to end all public funding of research on animals…
Pressure from lawmakers and experts, coupled with polling from Pew Research suggesting that a majority of Americans (52 percent) oppose the use of animals in scientific research, has led many departments to scale back these experiments at U.S. facilities… The top recipients of NIH funds in 2020 were institutions in wealthy countries, with German and Canadian institutes receiving the most taxpayer dollars sent abroad for animal testing that year. Other major grant recipients included entities in Australia, the Netherlands, Switzerland, South Africa, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Taiwan and Ghana.
The NIH funded research that made zebrafish addicts to the party drug ecstasy and to nicotine in a bid to identify the genes associated with addiction… Also funded was a $166,212 study into the consequences of alcohol abuse by training mice to binge-drink alcohol in the dark at University of Concepcion in Chile… Other animal research projects recently funded by the NIH have involved a $242,641 study that involved addicting pregnant rodents to alcohol and causing their babies “chronic unpredictable stress” to study the effects of prenatal alcohol exposure, at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada…
Canada’s McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, was given $633,250 to force-feed genetically modified mice human feces then measure their anxiety, to explore the role bacteria in the intestine play in anxiety and depression. At Nigeria’s University of Lagos pregnant rats were forced to eat high-salt diets to study salt-sensitive hypertension in a study funded in 2020 for $97,738. The NIH has additionally sent taxpayer money to China, where the agency has provided more than a half-million dollars since 2015 to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to study coronavirus-infected bats…
Dr. Alka Chandna, vice president of laboratory investigations cases at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said that NIH grants can be awarded to both facilities abroad and U.S. experimenters, who may then have the study conducted in another country “no matter how cruel.” “Experiments on animals are always cruel and should be ended, wherever they occur. But animals can be tormented in other countries in ways that wouldn’t be done in the U.S. — despite our country’s paltry animal protection laws”… “NIH-funded American experimenters are collaborating with foreign laboratories that are little better than CIA black-sites for torture.” SOURCE…
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