The other survived but had to be euthanized because of its injuries. One of the monkeys died from the scalding water after the cage it was in was accidentally placed in an industrial washing machine. In their petition, the Oregon employees - whose names were redacted in the version obtained by Gomberg - said they were devastated by the deaths of the two monkeys, named Earthquake and Whimsy, in August 2020. The other NIH-funded centers are run by the University of California-Davis, the University of Washington, Tulane University, the Texas Biomedical Research Institute, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Emory University. 19 report from InvestigateWest, a Seattle-based investigative journalism nonprofit. The Oregon facility was cited for more violations between 20 - with 31 violations of the federal Animal Welfare Act - than any of the six other primate research centers funded by the National Institutes of Health, according to a Jan. “While human error and the unpredictable behavior of undomesticated animals are impossible to completely eliminate, we strive to do everything in our power to employ best practices in engineering, training and supervision to protect against them,” Barr-Gillespie said. Gomberg is now behind a bill in the Oregon Legislature calling for greater transparency, accountability and oversight of the center, which is run by Oregon Health & Science University.Īsked to comment on the issues raised by Gomberg, OHSU sent a statement from Peter Barr-Gillespie, the university’s chief research officer and executive vice president, in which he said faculty and staff at the primate center “understand and embrace the responsibility to provide compassionate and leading-edge veterinary care that comes with the privilege of working with animals.” The documents revealed that dozens of center employees warned that a leadership culture which cuts corners, deflects responsibility and lacks accountability sets the stage for other tragedies. He had to wait for 17 months and pay a $1,000 fee to obtain thousands of pages of redacted internal documents. “But we have to agree that it’s not being done very well here in Oregon.”Īfter the scalding incident, Gomberg filed a public records request to learn more about the research center. “Reasonable people can disagree on whether using animals for medical research is scientifically valid or ethical,” Oregon Rep. Advocates want computer modeling and organ chip technology to be used instead, though the Food and Drug Agency Administration can still require animal tests. moved a small step away from animal testing when Congress passed a bill, signed into law by President Joe Biden in December, that eliminated the requirement that drugs in development undergo testing on animals before being provided in human trials. The problems at the facility in suburban Portland, Oregon, have surfaced amid a sharp debate between animal rights activists who believe experimenting on animals is unethical and researchers who say the experiments save and improve human lives. Workers have low morale, some have been drinking on the job, and dozens have complained about dysfunctional leadership, the documents show. Incidents at the Oregon National Primate Research Center, associated with Oregon’s largest hospital, include one in which two monkeys died after being placed into a scalding cage-washing system. (AP) - A state lawmaker in Oregon is using thousands of pages of redacted documents he sought for more than a year to launch legislation demanding more accountability and oversight of a primate research facility with a long history of complaints.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |