ALTERNATIVES TO THE USE OF ANIMALS IN PAIN/DISTRESS PRODUCING PROCEDURES
(The 3 R’s - Refinements, Reductions, Replacements)
According to the Animal Welfare Regulations, investigators are
required to provide documentation that they have considered
alternatives to pain or distress producing procedures. A pain or
distress producing procedure is one that could reasonably be presumed
to produce pain or distress in a person. Although analgesics,
anesthetics, and other means of reducing pain or distress are usually
used for such procedures, they do not change the fact that the
procedures potentially may produce pain or distress. The 3 Rs must be
addressed in the protocol: refinements (in techniques), reductions (in
the number of animals used), and replacements (with non-animal systems
or animals lower on the phylogenic scale). Documentation may include a
literature search. Investigators must provide the date of the search,
the keywords used, the years covered by the search (a minimum of 10
years), and the databases searched.
Listed below are some references regarding Alternatives:
- Animal Welfare Information Center URL: http://www.nal.usda.gov/awic
- AGRICOLA
(AGRICulture OnLine Access, produced by the U.S. Department of
Agricultures National Agricultural Library [NAL]) Subject coverage
includes agriculture in its broadest sense, alternatives to animal
testing, animal behavior, animal sciences, animal welfare, laboratory
animal medicine, physiology, veterinary medicine, wildlife, and zoology
from 1970 to the present. URL: http://www.nal.usda.gov/ag98
- Association of Veterinarians for Animal Rights (AVAR) - Alternatives in Education Database website URL: http://www.avar.org (scroll down to and click on Search Alternatives Database Online)
- BIOSIS Previews Biological and biomedical database containing more than 12 million citations URL: http://www.biosis.org
- CAB
ASTRACTS Agriculture, animal health, veterinary medicine, laboratory
animal medicine, husbandry, and welfare database indexing more than
11,000 journals, books, reports, newsletters, bibliographies, etc. URL:
http://www.cabi,org
- EMBASE
(produced by Elsevier Science Publishers in The Netherlands) Subject
coverage includes all aspects of human medicine and in vivo and in
vitro biomedical research on a wide variety of topics from 1974 to the
present. URL: http://www.elsevier.com:80/
- Johns Hopkins University Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing - Altweb website URL: http://altweb.jhsph.edu (click on Try Altweb Search Engine)
- MEDLINE
(published by the U. S. National Library of Medicine) Literature
citations covering the broad field of biomedical and clinical research,
veterinary medicine, laboratory animal science, animal welfare, and
alternatives and covers the period from 1984 to the present. URL: http://igm.nlm.nih.gov:80/Html-Documents/splash/igm_20/front.html
- Norwegian
Reference Centre for Laboratory Animal Science & Alternatives
(NORINA) Audiovisual Alternatives to Laboratory Animals In Teaching
website URL: http://oslovet.veths.no/NORINA (scroll down to and click on Search the NORINA Database)
- PASCAL
(produced by the French National Research Councils Institut de
lInformation Scientifique et Technique) This is a major
multidisciplinary database that provides coverage of chemistry,
biology, medicine, biomedical research, neurosciences, biotechnology,
zoology, and agricultural sciences, and covers the period from 1973 to
the present. URL: http://www.inist.fr/anglais/bbdang/pascal/pascal.htm
- PUBMED URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov(click on Pubmed)
- TOXLINE
(produced by the U.S. National Library of Medicine) Subject coverage
includes adverse drug reactions, Carcinogenesis, drug evaluation,
mutagenesis, pollution, pesticides, herbicides, radiation,
teratogenesis, and all other aspects of toxicology, and covers the
period from pre-1950 to the present. URL: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/nlmhome.html
- University of California at Davis URL: http://www.vetmed.ucdavis.edu/animal_alternatives/main.htm
|
