All drugs and some chemicals must be tested on animals before humans, but no one is certain how well such tests predict the toxic effects on people. A Johns Hopkins University team hopes to find out by comparing standard animal tests with more modern scientific methods that use human cells or computer models.
Source: The Baltimore Sun, March 16, 2017 via AAHA NEWStat.
Data from a U.S. Department of Agriculture website that has recently been taken down showed that more than 767,600 animals were used in research in 2015, including 42,159 in Maryland. The number included dogs, cats, guinea pigs, hamsters, rabbits, primates and some farm animals. The data did not include dogs and other animals held in labs but not experimented on. It also didn’t count rats, mice or birds, which are the most common test subjects.