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For immediate release:
September 21, 2021
Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382
Washington – PETA has filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit against the National Institutes of Health (NIH), NIH Director Francis Collins, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra. The lawsuit alleges that funding sepsis experiments on animals – despite decades of failure, wasted taxpayer dollars, and the NIH’s own admission that mice are not good models for humans – is abusing the agency’s discretion and violating their commitment to funding research to improve human health and minimizing the number of animals used in experiments.
Sepsis is the body’s extreme reaction to an infection that affects one in three patients who die in hospital and kills nearly 270,000 Americans in a typical year. Animal studies have not led to effective treatments. An important 2013 study showed that sepsis does not affect humans as it does mice, and Collins lamented the “loss of decades of research and billions of dollars” in developing 150 drugs that have successfully treated sepsis in mice but have failed in humans. At least 15 peer-reviewed publications over the past 18 years have described how sepsis in humans is fundamentally different from sepsis in other animals.
Despite this, the NIH still spends tens of millions of taxpayer dollars annually on sepsis experiments in which animals are injected with toxins or feces, dissected during invasive surgeries, force-fed harmful bacteria, and / or forced to inhale a bacterial “slurry.” Animals suffer from fever, chills, diarrhea, shortness of breath, lethargy, disorientation, shock, multiple organ failure, and eventually death.
“As long as the NIH continues to study sepsis in mice, the death toll will continue to rise,” says PETA Senior Vice President Katy Guillermo. “PETA’s lawsuit calls into question the agency’s bizarre commitment to these ineffective cruel experiments, rather than the health of the community it serves.”
PETA also wants agencies to focus on funding people-related sepsis research that can actually help sick people. Examples include in vitro experiments using human cells, sophisticated analysis of human genome data, mathematical and computer modeling of human biology, and experiments using donated human tissues.
Before filing a lawsuit, PETA drafted a comprehensive scientific and legal report detailing exactly why NIH funding for animal sepsis experiments is potentially illegal as well as scientifically unreasonable, and sent it to the NIH.
PETA has filed a claim under the Federal Administrative Procedure Act, which permits the agency’s final actions to be challenged as arbitrary or arbitrary, abuse of discretionary power, or otherwise contrary to law. PETA is represented by Billy B. Rouhling and Jonathan R. Mook of DiMuroGinsberg, PC.
PETA, whose motto is in part that “animals are not ours to experiment on” – opposes arrogance, a worldview focused on human excellence. For more information on PETA news gathering and reporting visit PETA.org or subscribe to the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram…
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