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PETA has been engaged in a frustrating exchange with the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) regarding CSPI's calls for increased animal testing. Most recently, CSPI Executive Director Michael Jacobson coauthored a letter published in Environmental Health Perspectives, in which he claimed that cancer studies in animals need to be longer. The letter admits that the current animal cancer assay has major shortcomings, and it describes several well-known failures. But rather than advocating for more sophisticated ways to test chemicals and drugs, as even the U.S. government is beginning to do, CSPI claims that poisoning animals for their entire lives, from before they are even born, will somehow improve the flawed tests.

As PETA scientists point out in a rebuttal letter in the December 2008 issue of Environmental Health Perspectives, lengthening the animal assay will only amplify the many scientific problems with the animal tests and does nothing to address the fundamental inability of animal studies to predict cancer in humans.

CSPI has also recently pushed hard for more animal testing on a natural, plant-based sweetener known as stevia, despite extensive animal testing that has already been conducted as well as hundreds of years of safe use of stevia by humans. CSPI asked the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to deny a request to use these natural sweeteners after having a UCLA graduate student and her advisor write a report on the alleged dangers of stevia derivatives. As PETA scientists detailed in extensive comments to the FDA, this report misrepresents existing evidence and makes the absurd assertion that because rats are not good "models" for toxicological effects in humans, all the studies of stevia derivatives that have been done on rats should be repeated on mice and more rats! PETA and the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) have also sent letters to CSPI Executive Director Michael Jacobson and Board President Kathleen O'Reilly asking CSPI to reconsider its stance.

A victory, however, was won for animals when the FDA ruled in December 2008 that stevia can be used for human consumption without additional animal tests.

What You Can Do
Please tell CSPI to stop calling for increased animal testing that does nothing to protect public health and only increases the suffering of animals in laboratories. Send a polite letter to Executive Director Jacobson urging him to redirect CSPI's efforts into pushing for progressive, non-animal methods that are actually capable of protecting consumers. Click here to view a sample letter for points that you can include in your letter.

Please send polite comments to:

Michael Jacobson, Ph.D., Executive Director
Center for Science in the Public Interest
1875 Connecticut Ave. N.W., Ste. 300
Washington, DC 20009
mjacobson@cspinet.org
202-265-4954 (fax)