🇺🇸By Nathan Libby, FC1 (AW), U.S. Navy (Vet.)
Why make him suffer?! art: file photo
Four major universities are squeezing the life out of thousands of animals in cruel, deadly and ineffective decompression sickness and oxygen toxicity experiments bankrolled by more than $3.8 million in taxpayer funding awarded by the U.S. Navy – even though the Navy knows the senseless tests don’t help humans.
Although these tests on animals at Duke University, the University of Maryland/Baltimore, the University of South Florida and the University of San Diego purportedly study the phenomenon called “the bends,” a painful condition that arises from the rapid reduction of ambient pressure leading to the formation of nitrogen bubbles in the bloodstream, their results fail to translate effectively to the condition experienced by humans susceptible to the bends, such as deep-sea divers.
The crude procedures include cutting open rats’ abdomens; embedding a recording device inside them and probing wires along their body through their back, neck and skull; inducing seizures without pain relief; and drilling into their skulls and attaching electrodes to their heads. In some experiments, mice as young as 8 to 12 weeks are confined to a decompression chamber for up to 60 minutes at a time in order to induce air embolism to mimic the bends and are injected with experimental substances. But wait — there’s more.
Mice and rats used in these tests are forced to run on treadmills and are electroshocked if they fail to keep up. Experimenters also insert probes into mice’s rectums, put petroleum-based chemicals into their eyes, drill into their skulls, inject chemicals into their brains and force them into carbon dioxide gas chambers. When experimenters have finished tormenting the animals, they kill them.
Other animals are not viable stand-ins for humans in studies of the bends due to important differences in the species’ anatomy and physiology. Furthermore, human divers experience varying depths, dive durations and individual factors that contribute to the condition, making it challenging to extrapolate reliable data from animal experiments. In fact, a former director of the Navy Medical Research and Development Center, Dr. Wayman W. Cheatham, has admitted as much, stating, “The impact of physiological differences between species with regard to disease processes … is well recognized throughout the medical research community.”
🎖️The Navy can’t rightfully claim to be a world leader in human-relevant medical research as long as it continues tormenting animals in barbaric tests that it knows are irrelevant to human health. These experiments make the Navy an outlier among the navies of our peer nations. The navies of France and the U.K., for instance, have already scrapped their animal testing programs for studying decompression sickness.
There are better ways for the Navy to achieve its goals. Sophisticated in vitro studies and reanalysis of existing human-diver data have already yielded promising results that are directly applicable to humans in diving conditions. Machine-learning techniques may aid in the prediction of symptoms such as seizures during hyperbaric oxygen therapy. Computational modeling can improve the performance of dive computers in order to equip divers to avoid the bends.
Last year, the Navy terminated its funding of decompression experiments conducted on sheep at the University of Wisconsin/Madison up to two years ahead of schedule after People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) sent Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro a complaint.
Tormenting and killing animals doesn’t advance human health, but advanced non-animal, human-relevant research methods do. It’s high time for the Navy to sink its pointless decompression sickness and oxygen toxicity tests on animals.