New Mexico’s U.S. Senator Tom Udall’s historic bill includes language that will drastically reduce, maybe even eliminate in some cases, the use of animals in toxic chemical testing.
By Jessica Johnson, APV Chief Legislative Officer
Wednesday, Jun. 22, 2016
Believe it or not, the federal Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) that regulates the way companies test chemical safety hasn’t been updated since its passage in 1976. That means—among other things—that the same outdated, inhumane animal testing methods have been used for decades, despite outrageous costs and unreliable applicability to humans.
It doesn’t take an expert to understand that slathering high doses of toxic pesticides, cosmetics, and other chemicals onto the sensitive eyes and skin of rabbits, guinea pigs, and mice—or forcing them to inhale or swallow these substances—is tortuously cruel.
That’s why we are over the moon after hearing the news that New Mexico’s U.S. Senator Tom Udall made history earlier this month when his landmark bill to overhaul federal chemical regulations passed the U.S. Senate! Weeks before the Senate vote, The Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act (H.R. 2576) passed the U.S. House of Representatives.
And now we can truly declare victory because, earlier today, President Obama signed the bill into law!
Not only will this landmark chemical safety bill overhaul the nation’s broken Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976, it has some of the strongest language ever passed by Congress to protect animals, including mice, rabbits, and guinea pigs, from invasive and unnecessary chemical testing.
And on top of that, more often than not, most drugs that pass animal trials are not approved by the Food and Drug Administration. In fact, according to the 2006 Secretary of Health and Human Services, Mike Leavitt, nine out of ten experimental drugs fail in human clinical studies because scientists cannot accurately predict how those drugs will affect people based on laboratory and animal studies.
So for animal advocates like us, this bill is about even more than just making sure the chemicals we use in our homes are safe—which is crucially important. It’s also about a milestone in history where, for the first time, we will see the dramatic reduction, if not eventually elimination in many cases, of animal use in chemical toxicity testing. And that’s something to celebrate today.
Thank you for being a voice for animals!
Jessica Johnson, Chief Legislative Officer, APV
