UC Berkeley fined in deaths of lab animals
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http://www.sfgate.com/education/article/UC-Berkeley-fined-in-deaths-of-lab-animals-5246309.php
UC Berkeley fined in deaths of lab animals
By Nanette Asimov, SFGate.com, Wednesday, February 19, 2014
The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced Tuesday that it has
fined UC Berkeley $8,750 for allowing five lab animals to die of thirst
in 2011.
The creatures were small, long-tailed rodents called voles that were
part of a study of circadian rhythms looking at how light affects
physiology, said Roger Van Andel, director of the Office of Laboratory
Animal Care at UC Berkeley.
"We took very aggressive action to make sure this sort of thing could
not occur again," Van Andel said. He noted that the death of the animals
was the first such incident to happen at the campus, which no longer
uses voles but performs research on about 100,000 mice each year in
addition to other animals.
UC Berkeley is not the only UC campus cited for violating the federal
Animal Welfare Act in recent years.
A macaque monkey at UC Davis was crushed to death in 2012 when it
fiddled with the squeeze mechanism that kept its cage closed. The campus
responded by changing the locks on cages only where researchers noticed
monkeys manipulating the squeeze mechanism, but the Agriculture
Department said that wasn't good enough.
In October, the federal agency ordered the California National Primate
Research Center, located on the UC Davis campus, to secure the locks on
all cages by November.
"These cage mechanisms are now all padlocked," said spokesman Andy Fell,
noting that the center houses about 5,000 monkeys that are checked twice
a day. Many of them also live in large family groups in half-acre
outdoor corrals, he said.
Davis researchers rely on the monkeys to test treatments for a range of
diseases, from HIV/AIDS to asthma and Alzheimer's, Fell said.
Another campus, UCSF, has one of the largest medical research programs
in the country and uses hundreds of thousands of animals in the
development of treatments for diseases.
In 2012, The Chronicle reported that incidents of animal neglect or
mistreatment persisted at the medical school even after it paid more
than $90,000 to settle such violations in the early 2000s. In one
instance, a primate was starved for weeks. And during 2008 and 2009, a
rhesus monkey was kept in a brain study despite chronic and painful
complications.
Although there is no evidence of similar violations lately, the campus
fired one researcher a year ago after the employee injected mice with
the wrong amount of an antiparasitic medicine, killing 110 of them.
What happened at UC Berkeley is that two graduate students placed about
150 voles in a light box on a Thursday, expecting a staff member to tell
caretakers to give them water, Van Andel said. But the staff member had
recently retired, and no one checked the animals until the following
Tuesday.
The neglect infuriates groups devoted to animal welfare, such as Stop
Animal Exploitation Now, which reported the monkey death at Davis, and
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
"While no penalty - monetary or otherwise - can undo the unimaginable
suffering of the frightened voles who were trapped in their cages as
they experienced excruciating pain before their deaths, we hope the fine
compels UC Berkeley to ensure that it adheres to the minimal animal
welfare standards required by law," said Alka Chandna, a lab oversight
specialist with PETA.
Van Andel said the labs have changed their procedures so that only the
caretakers may move animals into new enclosures, and that clear signs
are placed in boxes housing animals.
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