PETA Scientists Show Some Skin to Save Animals From Labs
To prevent animals from suffering, we animal advocates tend to use every tool at our disposal. PETA scientists, both male and female, have decided that it’s time to show some skin. So they’ve launched an easy online training tool that shows researchers how to replace animals in skin irritation and corrosion testing with human skin cells. What? You thought I meant something else?
Skin corrosion testing used to mean shaving rabbits, smearing chemicals onto their skin, and watching as the animals suffered. But for the past 37 years, PETA has funded the development of non-animal testing methods and our scientists have pushed experimenters to use them and governments to accept them. It’s working.
Easy, effective, animal-free ways to determine if a substance is going to be corrosive or irritating to human skin include using artificial membranes and 3-D reconstructed human skin made from human cells.
One way to make sure that scientists have access to information about the tests and how to use them is to put them online for free. So that’s exactly what the PETA International Science Consortium Ltd. did. Its online training tutorial provides all the technical details in an easy-to-follow format and a virtual walk-through of testing scenarios to help with troubleshooting.
It’s a great addition to the informative factsheets and webinars that our resident Bill Nyes have already provided to the scientific community—and which are being circulated by forward-thinking researchers. Moving away from animal tests is good science, but more importantly, it’s the only fair thing to do for the animals involved.
Are you ready to put some skin in the game and help get animals out of laboratories? Ask the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to stop requiring pharmaceutical companies to test drugs on animals and to accept the results of superior non-animal testing methods.
