| Old Codger 2008-03-29, 1:25 pm |
| http://www.wickedwildlifefund.com/test.html
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has been actively pressuring government
agencies in the United States, Canada, and Europe to greatly increase
the amount of testing that they require for new and existing
pesticides and other chemicals. The result of the WWF’s lobbying has
been the establishment of what threaten to be the largest
animal-testing programs of all time.
The WWF was the driving force in pressuring the U.S. Congress to
legislate the screening of chemicals for “endocrine (hormone)
disrupting” effects and has subsequently been heavily involved in
establishing the framework for the Environmental Protection Agency’s
(EPA) massive chemical-testing program now under development. As its
Web site points out: “WWF invested substantial resources in the EPA’s
Endocrine Disruptor Screening and Testing Advisory Committee,” which
“agreed upon a set of tests to form the foundation for the screening
and testing program.” What the WWF neglects to mention, however, is
that 10 of the 15 recommended screens and tests are animal-poisoning
studies, some of which kill hundreds or thousands of animals at a
time. According to scientific estimates, the WWF-backed endocrine
testing program will kill up to 1.2 million animals for every 1,000
chemicals tested, and with environmental organizations pressing for
tens of thousands of chemicals to be retested under this program, the
toll in animal suffering and death will be staggering. The WWF is also
pressuring government agencies in Europe to embark on a similar
animal-testing program.
In addition to lobbying for more chemical testing, the WWF has teamed
up with Procter & Gamble, S.C. Johnson, and other chemical companies
to create an institute to pursue “basic research” on endocrine
disruptors. On top of this, the WWF is now pushing the U.S. Congress
to pass a bill that would pour additional millions in public funds
into endocrine research––much of which would likely be used to fund
experiments on animals.
Unfortunately, the “endocrine disruptor” issue is not an isolated
example. The WWF has been a major force in pressuring the European
Union to amend its Chemicals Policy to require companies to test and
retest as many as 30,000 new and existing chemicals. The British
Institute for Environmental Health estimates that this process will
kill upwards of 45 million animals if the standard battery of
animal-poisoning tests is used. The WWF’s U.S. and Canadian offices
are also calling for more testing of pesticides, despite the fact that
more than 9,000 animals are already killed for each pesticide product
on the market. The organization has called for certain pesticides to
be tested for “developmental neurotoxicity” (DNT) using a test that
kills upwards of 1,300 animals each time it is conducted. This test
has been heavily criticized by scientists, including the EPA’s own
Scientific Advisory Panel, which concluded that “the exposure of rat
fetus/pups was not shown to be equivalent to human fetus/infant during
equivalent stages of brain development” and that “the current form of
the DNT guideline is not a sensitive indicator of toxicity to the
offspring.” In other words, WWF is calling for thousands of animals to
be killed in a test that scientists admit is not relevant to humans!
In its defense, the WWF says that “in the absence of effective,
validated alternatives, WWF believes that limited animal testing is
needed for the long-term protection of wildlife and people throughout
the world.” However, there is nothing “limited” about the massive
amount of animal testing that the WWF is endorsing. Dr. Joshua
Lederberg, Nobel Laureate in Medicine, pointed out in 1981: “It is
simply not possible with all the animals in the world to go through
chemicals in the blind way we have at the present time, and reach
credible conclusions about the hazards to human health.” Now more than
20 years later, millions of animals are still dying in agonizing
chemical toxicity tests, and we are no closer to getting dangerous
chemicals out of the environment. In fact, despite killing hundreds of
thousands of animals in painful chemical toxicity tests, the EPA has
not banned a single toxic industrial chemical in more than a decade!
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