Programs & Campaigns

A Voice for All Animals

April 7, 2004

Letters to the Editor
The New York Times
via e-mail: letters@nytimes.com

To the Editor:

The last thing we need is to breed more monkeys for research. (Re: April 6, 2004; Monkeys for Research: Much Coveted, and Hard to Come By). In 2002, the USDA Animal Care Report counted 96,061 primates available for research. Of those, more than 43,000 were not yet assigned to research protocols and were being maintained in breeding colonies.

Moreover, monkeys - and other animals - do not contract the human disease AIDS. So-called "AIDS research" on primates is conducted by infecting them with Simian Immune Virus. SIV does not produce the symptoms or disease syndrome of human AIDS. Studying monkeys with SIV to learn about HIV is like trying to navigate London with a map of New York City. Anyone attempting such a feat would be totally lost. This is why progress in the treatment of HIV has been through human clinical studies and other non- animal methods that do not involve animal suffering and death.

So why would the National Academy of Sciences recommend an increase in breeding more monkeys? Most likely it is because 8 out of the 12 member panel that compiled the report are deeply entrenched in monkey research, receiving federal grant money to conduct such experiments. The report is reminiscent of the 1986 push by NIH to produce more chimpanzees to study the emerging AIDS epidemic. The chimpanzee "model" was ultimately deemed unsuccessful, and by 1997 NIH convened a different panel to decide what to do with the now surplus population of chimpanzees. It is time to stop wasting federal monies to conform to the latest trend in primitive animal studies and instead fund state-of-the-art biomedical research without animals.

Barbara Stagno
Program Specialist
New England Anti- Vivisection Society