Group Charges That ICCVAM Is Blocking Advances in Testing Methods It Is Supposed to Promote
For Immediate Release:
March 7, 2011
Contact:
Robbyn Brooks 757-622-7382
Washington — Concerned that the leadership of the federal Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Validation of Alternative Methods (ICCVAM) is working against its congressionally mandated mission to validate modern testing methods, PETA is asking its 2 million members and supporters—via an Action Alert on its website—to contact Linda Birnbaum, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, and urge her to fire the committee's executive director, William Stokes. ICCVAM's failures were first exposed in PETA's 2007 report Regulatory Testing: Why Is the U.S. So Far Behind Europe as well as in a 2008 front-page Washington Post exposé. In 12 years, the agency has approved only a handful of non-animal regulatory testing options.
"Even though ICCVAM was put in place by Congress in 2000 to improve the science of toxicity testing and reduce animal use, under Stokes' leadership it has purposely and deliberately undermined the use of scientifically reliable and humane non-animal testing methods, " says PETA Director of Regulatory Testing Jessica Sandler. "It is long past time for Stokes to step down and be replaced with someone who is knowledgeable in non-animal testing methods and who will do the job that Congress intended."
The following are just some of the obstacles that ICCVAM has erected:
- Actively campaigning to prohibit the U.S. from adopting the Globally Harmonized System of labeling, which would allow the use of non-animal methods to assess skin irritation
- Insisting on the use of rabbits for testing chemical effects on eyes
- Failing to review any of the non-animal methods used by the Environmental Protection Agency for its Endocrine Disruptor Screening Program
- Handpicking members of its own advisory committee in order to exclude experts in non-animal testing methods
PETA's Action Alert comes after the group sent its own letter to Birnbaum. For more information, visit PETA.org.