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Loading...Quirky Law Could Kill Thousands Of Animals For New Cigarette
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,” said Wang.
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.
Take Action: Stop Testing Nicotine On Animals
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NIH Spends Our Money To Torture Animals For No Good Reason
Read more: animal cruelty, animal rights, animal testing, animal welfare, health, tobacco animal testing, tobacco companies, tobacco industry
Photo Credit: Abelthor
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+ add your ownDisgusting! thank you for sharing.
If you live in the US, your tax dollars pay for this torture and abuse of mice, rabbits, primates, dogs, cats, ferrets and other innocent creatures. Most of this testing can be done without the use of animals, and because none of these animals are enough like us (not even primates), we end up with drugs and other products that harm or even kill humans. The military also does some pretty horendous tests themselves. These facilities continue the use of animals because the NIH gives them tax dollar grants to do so. I agree with Barbara S and wish ANIMAL LIBERATION would visit them all, release the animals and burn them to the ground. KEEP UP THE FIGHT!!....
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I saw the a video of the bastard cigarette companies testing them on rabbits in the 1960s at school, there must have been more that 50 rabbits with their heads and bodies jammed in stocks so the could not move and this cigarette machine constantly putting lit cigarettes in their mouths till they smoked each one, then the process was repeated, it apparently went on for three or four hours a day from memory, they were either murdered and their lungs were cut up to see the damage inside or the rabbits died from the toxic poisoning of the gasses and nicotine. And the BASTARDS are STILL doing this ?
my head is going to explode this is so ridiculous and cruel!!! makes me furious!!
friggin idiots get a brain if you want to prove it does not hurt people smoke it yourself and quit torturing the animals you sick F***S
Unf*ckin' real!
Hell's Bells! I am a smoker and think that tops the cake. What a damned stupid idea.They proved years ago, the idiots, that forcing animals to smoke doesn't prove a damned thing. What they learned was that the data they gathered meant nothing as it didn't translate to humans. Didn't they kill enough animals already trying to create lung cancer in them - and it didn't happen while it does in humans. A waste of wonderful animals, time and money. Why do it again? Someone is throwing money at them they have to spend...so let's kill a few animals, write a few reports and make everybody happy - but the poor animals. I thought we were stopping this foolishness, murdering animals in labs in useless experiments. If they need a damned guinea pig, get a human. At least we know it works on us and we're the stupid ones that can't seem to lay cigarettes down.
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