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Target 2000, the conference on the 50% reduction target
Under the Title Target 2000 , a conference on the 50% reduction target was held in Brussels in April. The main initiative for the conference came from the European Coalition to End Animal Experiments, with the majority of the funding coming from Directorate-General XI of the European Commission.
The meeting was opened by Mrs Ruth Frommer, senior official at Directorate-General XI, with responsibility for the environment, nuclear safety and civil protection. She set the context for the meeting by stating that the Commission had adopted the target of a 50% reduction in the number of animals used in experiments by the year 2000, but that the conference would help assess "whether we will be able to meet that target?" She asked the meeting whe-ther the target was realistic and whether it was realistic when it was conceived.
She acknowledged that one of the main questions in relation to the target was what starting point should be used. In other words, 50% of the number of animals used in which year? Some observers have suggested that this opening speech and other comments from DG XI officials present at the meeting gave the impression that DG XI were not pleased about this unachievable target. The fact that the Council of Ministers, the decision-making body within the EU, had rejected the target, was simply never mentioned. All the discussion was about it as a Commission target.
Despite this uncertain premise, many of the presentations at the conference were of high quality. This was one of the best meetings on Reduction - as one of the three R s - which has been held to date.
The opening session was devoted to Views on Reduction Policy and started with Curt Malmborg, the Swedish Secretary of State for Agriculture who discussed the Swedish approach to the question of reduction. The next two speeches in the opening session, from Carlo Ripa di Meana MEP and Dr Bernward Garthoff of the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries Associations presented two very different perspectives. Mr Ripa di Meana took a strongly anti-vivisectionist position, regarding a 50% reduction as first step on the way to complete abolition. He argued that European legislation was needed to implement the target. He took a particularly negative view of transgenic animals, suggesting that they "threaten a new dark age for laboratory animals". By comparison, Dr Garthoff dismissed the idea of the 50% target as political activism and focused on reduction itself, rather than the target. He pointed out how active the pharmaceutical industry had been in all three R s and that the reduction which had been achieved so far was the result of science, not legislation.
Professor Michael Balls of ECVAM spoke next and suggested that the meeting should not spend too much time discussing details like when the 50% should start from or how it should be counted. Instead he focused on how replacement had already helped reduce the numbers of animals used in experiments. He acknowledged that total replacement was a long-term goal, but pointed out that partial replacements were very useful since they could provide pre-screens which led to a reduction in the number of compounds tested on animals.
Herman Koeter of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)(the body which approves toxicity testing protocols, both animal testing and replacements) opened his presentation by stating that numeric targets in animal experimentation were foolish, since they were both unrealistic and too restrictive. He then proceeded to describe the work of the OECD in the field of regulatory toxicity. He poin-ted out that the Fixed Dose Procedure (FDP) was already accepted by the OECD as an substitute for the LD50 and that two other procedures, variants on the theme of the FDP, would soon achieve acceptance as well.
The final two speakers in this session were Michael Festing who, as one would expect, gave an excellent overview of the reductions that can be achieved in animal toxicity testing by the use of inbred strains and appropriate statistical analysis, and Ms Karin Gabrielson of the Swedish Society Against Painful Experiments on Animals. Ms Gabrielson presented the animal protection perspective on reduction, managing to convey the seriousness with which the protection movement viewed this issue and their frustration as the slow rate of progress in reduction.
The second day of the meeting started with a session entitled Case Studies in Reduction with interesting presentations from Professor Horst Spielmann on Chemical Testing, Dr Coenraad Hendriksen on Vaccine Development and Production, Dr Hermann van Cauteren on Pharmaceutical Development, Mr Michael Linskens on Transgenic Animals and Professor Nicola Loprieno on Cosmetic Testing.
For the afternoon session, the conference first split into separate workshops, one for each of the interest groups : Academic Science, Industry, Regulatory/Government and Animal Protection. The chairman of each group the reported back to the full conference on what important issues they had identified from the meeting and what actions they would like to see follow it. The most prominent themes to emerge were the need for more work to develop refinements and replacements of animal procedures, the need for better national statistics of animal experimentation and better implementation of the existing Directive across the EU.
The conference ended with a round table discussion featuring Dr Herman van Cauteren, Dr Herman Koeter, Professor Michael Balls, myself, Mike Baker of the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection and Dr Guy Mahouy of the French Ministry for Research. Mike Baker made it clear that the two main objectives of the animal protection groups were to see a stronger target for reduction of animal experimentation included in the Commission's 6th Environmental Action Programme, due to run from 2000 to 2005, and to see some form of continuing body or standing committee, with representation from all the interest groups at the conference, which could ensure that all the reduction methodologies being discussed were actually used across the EU and some reductions achieved. This second idea is one which I supported. I argued that unachievable targets helped no-one, neither politicians, scientists or animals, but there was a lot that could be done to further promote and implement reduction methodologies. Some mechanism to achieve that implementation would be an excellent idea.
Whether such an initiative will come out of this conference is unclear, just as it is unclear how the Commission will deal with the question of animal experimentation when they draft the 6th Environmental Action Programme. However, in bringing the various interest groups together to discuss reduction this conference has made a very useful contribution to the European debate about animal experimentation.