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Commissioner Bjerregaard addresses Eurogroup
On 10th March, the Commissioner responsible for the Directive on animal experimentation, spoke to the Eurogroup for Animal Welfare. Although Commissioner Bjerregaard has responsibility for several animal welfare issues, she had specifically been invited to speak about the issue of animal experimentation.
In her speech, the Commissioner focused on two main issues, the collection of EU-wide statistics on animal experimentation and non-human primates. The Commission issued their first - and to date only - set of EU statistics in 1994. These were intended to record the number of animals used in experiments in 1991. However, there were a number of problems with these figures. The Commissioner pointed out that, previously, there had been no agreed format for the reporting of this information, with different countries submitting data collected according to widely varying national schemes. However, she announced that a standard system for reporting statistical information about the numbers of animal experiments had now been agreed between the relevant authorities in all the member states.
This new system should be implemented by each country during 1998, in time for data collection in 1999. The Commission then hopes to release a report on these statistics during 2000. In the meantime, the Commission will be publishing their second report on recent statistics, based on non-harmonised data, in the coming months.
Turning to the issue of non-human primates, the Commissioner explained that they were currently consulting with both industry and the NGO's. It appears that she was using the term NGO's to mean animal protection groups only. As far as is known, there has yet been no consultation with industry of scientific organisations. These consultations with the animal protection groups highlighted their concerns about guidelines on housing and care of primates, the use of wild-caught animals, the control of breeding establishments, proof of origin and the transport of primates. She indicated that it was hoped to produce a document on this issue in the near future although she did not indicate what legal status it would have.
A number of other issues were touched upon towards the end of the Commissioner's speech. These included the implementation of the Directive 86/609, which covers animal experimentation. On this subject she acknowledged that, eight years after the deadline, not every member state had implemented the Directive and that infringement procedures had been started in a number of cases. She also referred to the Target 2000 conference on the target for a 50% reduction in animal experiments in the EU by the year 2000. This target was proposed by the Commission, but not adopted by the EU. The Commissioner described the purpose of the conference as ‘discussing whether and how a reduction could be achieved'.
The European Centre for the Validation of Alternative methods was also mentioned in the speech. Bjerregaard introduced this subject with reference to the difficulty of developing replacement alternatives and the ‘alleged lack of concrete results', before turning to the good news with the announcement that the ECVAM Scientific Committee had approved the first validated alternative, which was for phototoxicity testing. Following this approval, the Commission had written to the OECD to request the inclusion of this method in the OECD test guidelines.
Overall, the Commissioner's speech contained no surprises. It represented a report of work in progress and no new initiatives were presented on any aspects of the issue.
It was also worth noting the issues which were not mentioned in the Commissioner's speech. This included the status of animals in the Treaty of Rome, guidelines on animal accommodation and husbandry, transgenic animals and genetic engineering, which were also not raised during the questions after the speech.