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en españolEach year, American doctors inject more than 3 million doses of Botox to temporarily smooth their patients' wrinkles and frown lines. But before each batch is shipped, the manufacturer puts it through one of the oldest and most controversial animal tests available.
To check the potency of its product under federal safety rules, Allergan Inc. injects mice with Botox until it finds a dose at which half of the animals die - a rough gauge of potential harm to humans.
Animal protection groups consider "lethal dose 50," as the test is known, to be "the poster child for everything that's wrong with animal testing," said Martin Stephens, vice president for animal research issues at the Humane Society of the United States. "It's as bad as it gets, poisoning animals to death."
Allergan officials say they have no choice. Without a federally approved safety test that does not use animals, a company spokeswoman says, lethal dose 50 "is by default the required test."
The controversy over the Botox test highlights the slow pace of government efforts to replace or reduce the large numbers of animals used by pharmaceutical companies, chemical manufacturers and consumer firms to ensure that their products are safe for people. A decade after Congress created a panel to spur the development of non-animal tests, only four such tests have been approved out of 185 reviews, according to the panel's records.
Full Story: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/11/AR2008041103733.html