Giant ‘Mouse’ to Protest NIH-Funded Sepsis Experiments
PETA Will Screen Video Footage of Mice Stitched Together, Demand End to These Cruel and Useless Studies
For Immediate Release:
January 23, 2018
Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382
What: A giant mutilated “mouse” and PETA supporters will greet returning staff at the Department of Health & Human Services on Wednesday to protest wasteful experiments on animals. With signs proclaiming, “Sepsis Tests: Mice Suffer, No Human Benefits,” the protesters will call on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to stop funding painful—and pointless—sepsis experiments on mice. Sepsis is a life-threatening condition in which the body turns on itself, producing symptoms that include agonizing pain, difficulty breathing, fever, chills, multi-organ failure, and often death.
When: Wednesday, January 24, 12 noon
Where: Hubert Humphrey Building, 200 Independence Ave. S.W. (near Second Street S.W.), Washington, D.C.
A 2013 landmark study documented that sepsis experiments on mice don’t yield information relevant to humans. At the time, NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins lamented the “loss of decades of research and billions of dollars” in the development of 150 drugs that successfully treated sepsis in mice but failed in humans—but inexplicably, NIH has since awarded more than $212 million in federal funding for such experiments.
PETA members will also screen graphic video footage of a procedure recently used in a sepsis experiment at the University of Virginia. The video shows a pair of mice who were sewn together so that they shared a bloodstream. These animals were given a severe infection, leading to sepsis.
“NIH is squandering limited health resources by funneling money into these worthless and wasteful studies while humans continue to die from sepsis,” says neuroscientist and PETA Research Associate Emily Trunnell, Ph.D. “PETA is calling for all federal funding to be redirected from these hideously cruel experiments into useful and humane research.”
