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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS
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MONTH: April 2008
Johns Hopkins medical school is last of top 20 in U.S. still using animal labs
BALTIMORE--Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore is "the lone holdout among medical schools in the top 20 in the annual U.S. News & World Report ranking still convening live animal labs," wrote Baltimore Sun reporter Jonathan Bor on March 27, 2008.
"Just 10 of the nation's 126 M.D.-granting medical schools use live animals during surgical rotations, according to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine," Bor added.
Ironically, the Johns Hopkins Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing, founded in 1981, is the oldest such center in the world.
Among the other top-ranked U.S. medical schools, New York Medical College in November 2007 announced that echocardiography and simulators would replace the use of live dogs to teach heart function to first-year medical students, beginning in 2008.
Case Western Reserve University announced in December 2007 that it had already quit using live dogs, cats, and ferrets in medical training, and would eliminate the use of pigs after the spring 2008 semester.
The Medical College of Wisconsin quit using dogs in teaching exercises in 2007, but still uses pigs. PCRM protested a February 2008 exercise using 36 pigs with a billboard posted nearby.
Altogether, 12 U.S. medical schools have quit using live pigs since 2006, Dallas cardiologist and PCRM representative John J. Pippin told Bor.
Medical schools abroad are moving in the same direction. Monash University in Australia is among the holdouts. Australian shadow minister for agriculture John Vogels in February 2008 asked the Department of Primary Industry to investigate Monash exercises in which undergraduate clinical and experimental cardiovascular physiology students make an incision in the throats of anesthetised rabbits, insert a catheter, and administer drugs to adjust the rabbits' heart rates.
"The rabbits are then given a fatal drug overdose and disposed of," reported the Melbourne Age. About 30 rabbits per year are killed in the exercises. Students may watch a videotaped version of the procedure instead.
The trend toward eliminating live animal labs in medical schools developed after dissection fell out of vogue in middle schools and high schools, inspiring suppliers of teaching resources to develop increasingly sophisticated simulations, which eventually replaced more advanced and costly procedures.
The replacement process recently gained momentum in Russia."The International Network for Humane Education and the Department of Ecology, Health & Safety and Hunting Management of the Faculty of Zoology at Tomsk Agricultural Institute have signed a formal agreement to end the use of animals for dissection," announced InterNICHE coordinator Nick Jukes and Elena Maroueva, co-founder of the animal rights group VITA.
"InterNICHE and VITA will supply the department with computer hardware and zoology software," Jukes and Maroueva said on March 17. " The project will save hundreds of animals every year. Tomsk Agriculture Institute has become the sixth Russian higher education institute to sign an agreement with InterNICHE to end such use of animals in teaching," Jukes and Maroueva added.
The Tomsk project was funded from a bequest by Tatyana Pavlova, founder of the Centre for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in Moscow, who died on August 21, 2007.
In India, the West Bengal Board of Secondary Education in February 2008 instructed sixth grade syllabus publishers to omit experiments involving mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians. A similar directive was issued in 2005 to eliminate such experiments during the last two years of high school.