Kathleen M Conlee

• Humane Society of the United States

Creating and developing new drugs can take decades, costs millions of dollars, requires untold human effort and usually, takes thousands of animal lives. Despite regulators professing confidence in non-animal approaches and guidance documents that permit submission of non-animal data, toxicity testing is routinely carried out in animals, employing...

Whether they realize it or not, most stakeholders in the debate about using animals for research agree on the common goal of seeking an end to research that causes animals harm. The central issues in the controversy are about how much effort should be devoted to that goal and when we might reasonably expect to achieve it. Some progress has already...

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is a major biomedical research-funding body in the United States. Approximately 40% of NIH-funded research involves experimentation on nonhuman animals (Monastersky, 2008). Institutions that conduct animal research with NIH funds must adhere to the Public Health Service (PHS) care and use standards of the Off...

The use of chimpanzees for biomedical research and testing has been on the decline in recent years and is now restricted or prohibited in a number of countries, largely due to ethical concerns, public opinion, financial costs, as well as scientific issues. The US and Gabon are the only countries that still have chimpanzees for research purposes, wi...

Pain and distress in animal research adversely affects animal welfare and scientific quality, as well as erodes public support for research. Journal requirements for inclusion of detailed information on animal welfare in submitted manuscripts, including how animal pain and distress were addressed, would likely increase scientist attention to pain a...

Finding ways to minimize pain and distress in research animals is a continuing goal in the laboratory animal research field. Pain and distress, however, are not synonymous, and measures that alleviate one may not affect the other. Here, the authors provide a summary of a meeting held in February 2004 that focused on distress in laboratory animals....

Distress in animal research is difficult to address and often overlooked, despite mandates in the U.S. to minimise animal distress. Consequently, The Humane Society of the U.S. held an expert workshop on animal distress, including whether creation of an operational definition of distress is possible. Discussion topics included what an operational d...

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the most commonly used agent for euthanasia of laboratory rodents, used on an estimated tens of millions of laboratory rodents per year worldwide, yet there is a growing body of evidence indicating that exposure to CO2 causes more than momentary pain and distress in these and other animals. We reviewed the available literatu...

An analysis of primate research in the USA, including the number and species of non-human primates used, types of research, levels of invasiveness, housing conditions and funding, is an important step in addressing various concerns (ethical and scientific) surrounding primate research. An analysis of monkey and chimpanzee research, conducted by The...

The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) publicly launched its Pain and Distress Initiative in 2000, to encourage greater attention to the prevention and alleviation of pain and distress in research animals. The initiative's ultimate goal is the phasing out of all significant pain and distress in animal research by 2020. There have been sever...

The public’s perception that animals suffer in biomedical research and testing is a key factor fueling the controversy over animal experimentation. This public concern has brought about laws and regulations that specically address laboratory animal pain and distress and call for efforts to limit or at least report when animal pain and distress occu...

Approaches and challenges to refining and reducing animal use in regulatory testing are reviewed. Regulatory testing accounts for the majority of animals reported in the most painful and/or distressful categories in the United States and Canada. Refinements in testing, including the use of humane endpoints, are of increasing concern. Traditional ap...

It is widely agreed, and often legally required, that distress and pain in research animals should be minimized--for the sake of animal welfare, ethical obligation, and public concern, as well as scientific quality. As testimony to the importance of distress and pain to stakeholders interested in research animals, many countries compile and publish...