“Tobacco – light or not – poses serious risks to the user’s health and
to the health of others. Wasting countless more animal lives to prove the
safety of an inherently harmful product…would be grossly counterproductive for
human health,” says Bingxuan Wang, a researcher with the Physicians Committee
for Responsible Medicine.
“In some of the horrendous tobacco tests conducted, rats would be forced
to breathe tobacco smoke for as long as six hours a day for months at a time by
jamming the animals into tiny canisters and pumping concentrated cigarette
smoke directly into their noses. The animals would then be killed and their
bodies dissected.”
Belgium, Germany and the U.K. have banned animal testing for tobacco products and Canada
uses non-animal methods. In April 2012,
India banned using live animals in university and hospital research.
The following article by Sharon Seltzer was
published by Care2 on 30 May 2012.
More than 8 million of the 47 million U.S. adult cigarette smokers have
a serious illness caused by smoking, according to the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention. Tobacco also costs the economy $96 billion a
year for medical care. To counter the bad press, the tobacco industry has
created new “light” tobacco products they claim are less harmful. In order to
make that claim, a quirk in the law requires the products to be tested on thousands of animals.
Two years ago, Congress passed a law that requires tobacco
companies to prove that any of its products labeled “light” or “mild”
significantly reduce the risk of tobacco-related disease to smokers and benefit
the health of the population. The Food and Drug Administration was placed in
charge of regulating the law. They drafted guidelines that required animal
testing to be part of the process.
The National Cancer Institute, Institute for Medicine, Physicians
Committee for Responsible Medicine and PETA have all called for an end to the
animal testing clause.
The National Cancer Institute doesn’t believe the light cigarettes are
less harmful to a person’s health. In a recent report they stated, “There is no
convincing evidence that changes in cigarette design… have resulted in an
important decrease in the disease burden caused by cigarette use.”
Bingxuan Wang, a toxicology
researcher with the nonprofit Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine is
very concerned about the number of animals that will needlessly die during these tests.
“The bottom line is, tobacco – light or not – poses serious risks to the
user’s health and to the health of others. Wasting countless more animal lives
to prove the safety of an inherently harmful product, especially when such
tests in the past have been misleading, would be grossly counterproductive for
human health,” says Bingxuan Wang, a researcher with the Physicians Committee
for Responsible Medicine.
The Institute of Medicine said, “It is not possible to make laboratory
animals use tobacco products the way humans do, and there are inherent
interspecies differences that prevent meaningful extrapolation of human
effects.” Experiments conducted on animals 50 years ago found that tobacco did
not cause lung cancer, but that information was obviously incorrect in humans.
PETA said, “In some of the horrendous
tobacco tests that could be conducted, rats would be forced to breathe tobacco
smoke for as long as six hours a day for months at a time by jamming the
animals into tiny canisters and pumping concentrated cigarette smoke directly
into their noses. The animals would then be killed and their bodies dissected.”
Belgium, Germany and the U.K. have banned animal testing for tobacco products and Canada
uses non-animal methods.
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