NIH’S $12 Billion Waste Condemned in New D.C. Ad
PETA Denounces 90 Percent Failure Rate of Animal Experiments to Lead to Therapies for Humans
For Immediate Release:
January 29, 2018
Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382
Ninety percent of experiments on animals fail to help humans. That’s the message of a new full-page PETA ad slated to run on January 31 in The Hill and The Washington Times that exposes the waste of taxpayer dollars and animal lives by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The ad, which shows a hamster on a wheel, reads, “The Reality Is That 90% of NIH Animal Experiments Are Going Nowhere.”
The ad also reveals that each year, NIH spends $12 billion—47 percent of its research budget—on experiments on animals even though multiple studies show that more than 90 percent of animal experiments fail to lead to treatments for humans. Furthermore, 95 percent of pharmaceutical drugs that test safe and effective in animals fail in human clinical trials.
“Experiments on animals are a dead end, and the National Institutes of Health is pouring billions of taxpayer dollars straight down the drain,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “PETA is calling on NIH to stop squandering money and animal lives and instead direct funds toward sophisticated non-animal research methods that will actually help humans suffering from diseases.”
In the ad, PETA points to several high-cost experiments that NIH gave funds to, including the following:
- $7.6 million to starve monkeys in “caloric restriction” experiments at the University of Wisconsin–Madison
- $15.5 million to addict monkeys and mice to alcohol and then force them to go through withdrawal at Oregon Health & Science University
- $5 million to breed colonies of dogs to have crippling canine muscular dystrophy at the University of North Carolina and Texas A&M University, even though 35 years of experimenting on these dogs has failed to produce an effective treatment for the human form of the disease
NIH has admitted that experiments on animals “often fail to provide good ways to mimic disease or predict how drugs will work in humans, resulting in much wasted time and money.”
