Workers at a Nevada research lab were checking on a primate room when they came across a ghastly sight: Thirty dead monkeys were essentially cooked alive after someone left the heater on. Two others were near death and had to be euthanized.
At a lab run by the same company, a monkey died last year after it was sent through a an automatic cage washer by accident. The temperatures were so scalding the monkey never had a chance.
The two cases have led to calls for greater oversight and enforcement of the animal research industry after an alarmingly high number of deaths in recent years.
Critics say fines for violations at animal research labs are so puny that they do nothing to deter violations. The lab where the monkeys died in Nevada was fined a mere US$14,000 for the two incidents, according to records from the US Department of Agriculture.
“The penalties have given them virtually no motivation whatsoever to cease violating the law,” said Michael Budkie, the executive director of the Ohio-based Stop Animal Exploitation Now.
“If they are literally killing animals through negligence, something is wrong with the system,” he said.
The group asked Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack last month for an independent probe into animal deaths at research labs.
Agriculture Department records show there were 97 negligent animal deaths at research facilities nationwide over the last two years, a figure that does not include lab mice and rats.
One of the biggest violators was Charles River Laboratories, where the 33 monkeys died at facilities in Reno in 2008 and Sparks last year.
The Massachusetts-based company is one of the world’s largest suppliers of clinical and laboratory research services to pharmaceutical and biotech companies.
It also is a leading importer of research animals and breeds some of its own animals for medical research. Its researchers in Nevada are working to find a cure for cancer, new flu vaccines and better ways to treat obesity.
Spokeswoman Amy Cianciaruso said survival rates for major diseases are at an all-time high thanks to the discovery of new drugs made possible in part by the work of scientists at Charles River labs. The company has called the monkey deaths a “terrible and unfortunate tragedy,” but said they were isolated cases and corrective actions were taken. Agriculture Department records show one employee was fired and another disciplined.
“Charles River’s work is an essential component of the research that has led to these discoveries and has played a vital role in medical advances for humans as well as animals,” Cianciaruso said.
The dead monkeys represent a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of primates used for research around the country.
Charles River is one of 26 registered US importers of non-human primates, a group that includes zoos, universities and private labs, said Christine Pearson, a spokeswoman for the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
A series of errors began when a repair technician left the heater in the “ON” position at 8:20am. An alarm three minutes later warned the temperature in the primate room had risen to an unsafe 28.9˚C, but no one noticed it, a department report shows.
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