For Instant Launch:
September 11, 2023
Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382
Washington – PETA is asking on two international authorities—the World Well being Group (WHO) and the World Organisation for Animal Well being (WOAH), which coordinate worldwide actions collectively—to implement international requirements for stopping and controlling zoonotic pathogens in primates and crack down on the worldwide monkey experimentation–provide pipeline. This follows a damning exposé printed by Spanish animal safety group Abolición Vivisección revealing that Camarney—Europe’s largest provider of imported monkeys for experimentation, based mostly in Spain—takes woefully insufficient measures to forestall the unfold of illnesses which are simply transmissible from monkeys to people, together with tuberculosis (TB).
PETA and Abolición Vivisección’s letter to the WOAH and the WHO, despatched as we speak, warns that enforcement of the WOAH Terrestrial Code—international requirements designed to enhance the security of the worldwide commerce in animals—is urgently wanted.
Abolición Vivisección’s exposé reveals that macaques’ well being certificates seem to have been erased from Camarney’s database and that the power fails to document animals’ causes of loss of life or necropsy outcomes. Inspectors have been denied entry to some areas as a result of the location didn’t have monkeys’ present TB take a look at outcomes, and its reportedly poorly secured cages posed the danger that monkeys might turn out to be injured or escape.
Camarney is owned by Noveprim Ltd. (a Mauritian firm), and Charles River Laboratories owns 49% of Noveprim’s shares. Charles River is presently beneath federal civil and prison investigation for potential violations of legal guidelines governing the importation of monkeys into the U.S. The U.S. Securities and Trade Fee additionally not too long ago launched an investigation into Charles River’s procurement of monkeys from Asia.
A caged monkey at Camarney reaches for a palm frond. Picture credit score: Abolición Vivisección
Many of the monkeys at Camarney are imported from Mauritius, the place 200 monkeys have been killed because of a TB outbreak in Could. Monkeys imported from that nation have been not too long ago discovered to be contaminated with TB in a Michigan laboratory the place two folks examined optimistic for TB and have been then referred for therapy.
The experimentation trade ships wild-caught, endangered long-tailed macaques globally, regardless of WOAH Terrestrial Code Article 7.8.7, which states that endangered species must be used for experiments solely in “distinctive circumstances,” “[a]nimals must be acquired legally,” and “[t]he use of untamed caught nonhuman primates is strongly discouraged.”
PETA—whose motto reads, partially, that “animals usually are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For extra data, please go to PETA.org, hearken to The PETA Podcast, or comply with the group on X (previously Twitter), Fb, or Instagram.
