Giant Wounded ‘Mouse’ to Protest Pitt’s Horror-Show Sepsis Experiments

PETA Protesters Will Crash University of Pittsburgh Meeting to Demand End to Cruel, Ineffective Tests on Mice

For Immediate Release:
February 16, 2018

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

What:    Led by a giant “surgically mutilated mouse,” PETA supporters will descend on the University of Pittsburgh’s Senate Council meeting on Tuesday to urge Chancellor Patrick Gallagher to end the school’s cruel sepsis tests, in which experimenters puncture mice’s intestines so that fecal matter and accompanying bacteria leak into their abdomens, producing sepsis—a life-threatening reaction to severe infection. The mice suffer for days with widespread pain, difficulty breathing, and multi-organ failure. Protesters will be armed with signs proclaiming, “Patrick Gallagher: Stop Wasting Pitt $$ on Cruel Mouse Experiments.”

When:  Tuesday, February 20, 2:15 p.m.

Where:    Intersection of Schenley and Roberto Clemente drives, Pittsburgh

“Years of these tests have resulted in hundreds of dead mice and a grand total of zero treatments for sepsis in humans,” says PETA Chief of Laboratory Case Management Alka Chandna, Ph.D. “PETA is calling on Pitt to put an immediate stop to these horrific, worthless experiments.”

PETA’s eyewitness investigation revealed that many mice used in these sepsis studies were, as one Pitt veterinarian stated, “falling over dead” inside cages. A 2013 landmark study showed the irrelevance of data from tests on mice to human sepsis, burns, and trauma, compelling the director of the National Institutes of Health to lament the time and resources wasted in developing 150 drugs that successfully treat sepsis in mouse experiments but fail in humans. Yet Pitt experimenter Rajesh Aneja has received $1.4 million in federal funding to conduct these useless experiments.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.