At its February midyear meeting, the American Bar Association passed a resolution that urges the United States and other national governments to “promote the development and use of methods that aim to replace, reduce, and refine the use of animal models in research and testing,” and “to remove barriers to, and create incentives for, the use of non-animal model research and testing methods in regulatory testing and federally sponsored research.” According to its accompanying report, the policy declaration is based on the “Three Rs”—replacement, reduction and refinement—but “there is no legal obligation to apply any of them.” Obstacles to improvement include funding issues and in some circumstances, regulations may impede replacement when they expressly require the use of animals.
New Jersey has a statute addressing animal testing, N.J.S. 4:22-59 (animal testing prohibited under certain circumstances). This mandates that no “traditional animal test method” be used “for which there is an appropriate validated alternative test method that has been adopted by the relevant federal agency or agencies responsible for regulating the specific product or activity for which the test is being conducted pursuant to the Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Validation of Alternative Methods (ICCVAM),” which operates under the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Significantly, the statute expressly excepts application of this “to any animal test conducted for the purposes of medical research.”
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