Agency Poised to Finalize Its Guidance to Companies on Tobacco Testing
For Immediate Release:
June 4, 2012
Contact:
David Perle 202-483-7382
Washington -- PETA today submitted official scientific comments to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regarding the agency's draft guidance on testing for "modified risk tobacco products," which, as currently written, allows tobacco companies to maim, kill, and dissect animals in order to market their products as less harmful. PETA, along with hundreds of consumers who submitted comments to the FDA through an action alert on PETA's popular website, is calling on the FDA to amend its guidance to recommend using only modern, effective non-animal testing methods—including computer simulation, tests using human cells, and clinical studies with human smokers—that are widely available and are the required tests in Canada. Belgium, Germany, the U.K., and other countries have all banned the testing of tobacco products on animals.
"Everyone knows that tobacco products are inherently hazardous, addictive, and deadly and that decades of animal tests did not predict the link between smoking and cancer," says PETA Vice President of Laboratory Investigations Kathy Guillermo. "PETA is calling on the FDA to make it clear, once and for all, that no more animals should suffer and die in tests for new tobacco products, 'less harmful' or not."
In some of the tests that could be conducted under the FDA's current guidelines, rats would be jammed into tiny canisters and have concentrated cigarette smoke pumped directly into their noses for as long as six hours a day for months at a time. The animals would then be killed and their bodies dissected. Government agencies still fund studies in which infant monkeys and their mothers are locked into chambers where they are forced to breathe cigarette smoke for months on end. For decades, the tobacco industry used results from animal tests like these to deny the link between smoking and cancer because animals forced to inhale cigarette smoke don't develop the same diseases that human smokers do.
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