Claims of spike in US animal testing for new chemicals disputed

A major environmental organisation is disputing new claims by two animal rights groups that animal testing for new chemicals at the US Environmental Protection Agency rocketed in 2017. This was the first full year for the updated Toxic Substances Control Act (Tsca), which governs America’s chemical policy. When the almost 40-year-old Tsca law was modernised in June 2016, it directed the EPA to ‘reduce and replace’ the use of vertebrate animals in chemical testing through tools like computational toxicology and bioinformatics, as well as high-throughput screening methods and associated prediction models. However, upon examination of the EPA’s ChemView database, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) and the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) concluded that in 2017 the agency required or requested 331 animal tests for each new chemical put on the market, meaning the use of around 76,000 animals.