The Environment and Animal Society Taiwan (EAST), at a press conference in Taipei yesterday, showed eight beagles that had been caged in a laboratory for animal testing for years before they were rescued last month, urging the government to enhance its inspections of and control over laboratories that conduct experiments on animals.
The civic animal welfare group showed a video clip of the dogs huddling together in a corner when they were first taken out of the laboratory — in which they spent the past eight years in a small, confined space without sunlight, while being subjected to pharmacokinetic testing.
EAST director Chen Yu-min (陳玉敏) said the dogs were taken out of the laboratory by chance, before they could be put to death or sold to other laboratories for further experimentation.
Photo: Chien Jung-fong, Taipei Times
The dogs underwent thorough health examinations after they were rescued and they were all in poor health, she added.
All eight dogs were suffering from heart disease, six were overweight or anemic, and some had adrenal hyperactivity, external parasites, chronic pancreatitis, splenic tumors or other health problems, Chen said.
She added that while the external parasites were eliminated through treatment, the animals’ other diseases need to be controlled by long-term medication.
The group was shocked by their poor health, which obviously deteriorated over a long period of time, and the case showed that animals used for testing drugs are not cared for by professional veterinarians, she said.
“The Council of Agriculture’s [COA] statistics showed that 3,941 dogs were used for animal testing in the past 10 years, of which 2,186 were put to death and the rest may have been transferred to other facilities for experiments or training, still enduring discomfort or pain,” she said.
“More than 10 million other animals were used in animal testing in the past 10 years,” Chen added.
The group urged the council and the Ministry of Health and Welfare to enhance their supervising mechanisms, including increasing inspections of the nation’s 213 animal experiment facilities.
Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Lin Shu-fen (林淑芬) said the council’s data show that only 100 of the 213 facilities included veterinarians in their institutional animal care and use committees.
“The Animal Protection Act (動物保護法) stipulates that laboratory animals used for scientific purposes must be allowed to recover their physiological functions before being used for further experiments,” Lin said, adding she doubts that testing drugs on ill-conditioned dogs would result in safe and correct data.
Lin Tsung-yi (林宗毅), head of the animal protection section of the COA’s Department of Animal Industry, said the monitoring mechanism includes an internal one — the institutional animal care and use committee assembled by the facilities — and the inspections conducted by the council.
“If self-management by the animal experiment facilities’ internal committees is done properly, cases such as this one should not occur at all,” he said.
Lin added that the council had already amended related regulations last year to make the review of animal-testing proposals stricter, and they hope to increase the inspection frequency from 40 sites per year to about 50 sites this year.
EAST also urged the council to set up a mechanism enabling retired laboratory animals to be adopted by the public.
EAST said the eight beagles are now available for adoption through its Web site (www.east.org.tw) or the group can be contacted by calling (02) 2236-9735/6.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not