Under the direction of its administrator, Christine Todd Whitman, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) requires more chemical toxicity testing on animals than any other federal agency in the United States. This means that every year across this country, tens of thousands of rats, mice, dogs, hamsters, fish, birds, and other animals are subjected to crude and cruel laboratory poisoning experiments in which they are forced to swallow or inhale massive doses of pesticides, industrial chemicals, and other synthetic substances. Then, the EPA often ignores or dismisses the results of these tests as irrelevant to humans.

Dr. Joshua Lederberg, Nobel Laureate in Medicine, wrote back in 1981: “It is simply not possible with all the animals in the world to go through chemicals in the blind way we have at the present time, and reach credible conclusions about the hazards to human health.” Today, more than 20 years later, animals are still choking on chemicals in EPA-mandated tests, and the EPA is still choking on its own inertia and is no closer to getting dangerous chemicals off the market and out of the environment. Instead, the EPA is spending millions of tax dollars to implement a number of ill-conceived programs to retest thousands of commonly used chemicals. Christine Whitman is following blindly in the footsteps of her predecessors by endorsing the wholesale slaughter of animals in the EPA’s massive Endocrine Disruptor Screening Program (EDSP).

The EDSP threatens to become the largest animal-testing program in U.S. history. It is a frantic and poorly conceived plan to evaluate the effects of industrial chemicals on the human hormonal (or endocrine) system by looking at the reproductive organs of animals. The EDSP has been denounced by international scientists as “blindly stupid” and “appalling toxicology.” Moreover, according to scientific estimates, the tests that the EPA is planning to use could kill as many as 1.2 million animals for every 1,000 chemicals assessed, and as many as 80,000 chemicals may be tested. Therefore, the number of animals who suffer and die in the EDSP could reach into the tens of millions. Click here for more information about the EDSP.

At PETA’s urging, Congress ordered the EPA to spend $4 million in 2002 to develop non-animal tests—a tiny bit of the agency’s huge $600 million research and development budget. But so far, Christine Whitman has sat on the money while animals continue to die. Not only are the animal tests being developed under the EDSP not being subjected to proper scientific validation to ensure that their results are relevant and applicable to humans, they are completely unnecessary. We already know that more than 300 synthetic chemicals contaminate the human body. But rather than taking action to protect the public and the environment from these and other known hazards, the EPA is forever claiming that it needs “more information” in order to take action. In fact, the EPA hasn’t banned a single toxic industrial chemical in more than 12 years!

Christine Todd Whitman is sacrificing our children in order to keep her reckless and dangerous animal-testing programs in place. Instead of reducing children’s exposure to chemicals known to be dangerous and implementing non-animal test methods that are cheaper and more reliable than animal testing, she’d rather waste time, money, and lives in a bottomless pit of animal testing.
Non-animal screening and testing methods hold tremendous promise for reducing or eliminating animal use in the EDSP. PETA has submitted a viable, non-animal alternative to the EDSP, but the EPA has failed to take any action on it. Click here to learn more about this in vitro plan.

Cell-based (in vitro) assays are generally more sensitive, reliable, and relevant than animal-based methods and produce results more quickly and at a much lower cost. In vitro assays are excellent models for investigating the mechanism of action for hormone-disrupting chemicals and can be performed either individually or in great numbers through automated “high-throughput” screening.

What You Can Do

Christine Todd Whitman should be leading the EPA into the new century and developing sophisticated non-animal test methods. Instead, she’s keeping the government mired in Dark Ages testing programs that won’t help protect the environment or people.

Please urge Christine Whitman and the EPA to eliminate the cruel animal-testing portion of the Endocrine Disruptor Screening Program. Write to:

The Honorable Christine Todd Whitman
Administrator (1101A)
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
1200 Pennsylvania Ave. N.W.
Washington, DC 20460
Fax: 202-501-1450
E-Mail: Whitman.Christine@epa.gov