Use of animals in research
The use of animals in research has been essential in the fight against bacterial meningitis and septicaemia, devastating diseases which affect thousands of families in the UK and Ireland each year. Molecular techniques that do not need animals are advancing, but there is currently no alternative to using animals at some stage to develop new treatments and vaccines.
The top line message from the Charity's Policy on Animal Research is that:
"Meningitis Research Foundation will only fund research involving live animals when this is essential to the outcome of the research, there is no alternative method of obtaining the data, and when pain and distress to animals is minimised. Researchers supported on the Foundation's grants must take account of advances in the refinement, replacement and reduction of animal use."
Sometimes called 'the 3 Rs', what is meant by refinement, replacement and reduction is as follows:
Replacement - use alternative methods, e.g. testing on cell cultures (in vitro), computer models, etc. whenever possible
Reduction - use statistics to reduce the number of animals that must be used for each experiment to the minimum necessary to obtain reliable results
Refinement - improve the experiment to make sure animals suffer as little as possible
Along with most of the main medical research charities in the UK, the Foundation is a member of the Association of Medical Research Charities and adheres to the AMRC statement on animal research. All AMRC charities subscribe to the 3 R's.
Currently, the majority of research projects within the Foundation's programme do not use animals, and those projects which do involve research on animals use mice and rats. This is broadly in line with the pattern of animal research in the UK. The proportion of animal types used in research across the whole of the UK in 2000 (the latest year for which figures are available) was:
- mice, rats and other rodents: 82%
- fish, birds and reptiles: 14%
- small mammals (e.g. rabbits, ferrets): 1.3%
- large mammals (e.g. cows, sheep, pigs): 2.3%
- dogs and cats: 0.4%
- monkeys: 0.1%
Great apes (chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans) have not been used for research in the UK for over 20 years and their use is now banned.
Despite the progress that has been made in research into meningitis and associated infections, there is still much work to be done to stop death and disability from these diseases. We, like many other leading medical charities, need to fund more research to save more lives and for the foreseeable future, a percentage of this research will involve animals.
However we do understand that many people have strong, personal opinions about animal research and appreciate that they may have a different point of view. Any of the Foundation's supporters who prefer not to support research that uses animals can restrict their donations either to research in the programme which does not involve animals, or to charitable objects other than research: awareness and information, support and relief of distress for those affected.
Page last updated 01.02.07