National Toxicology Program

• 'Wasted Money, Wasted Lives' Report
• House Appropriations Testimony
• Senate Appropriations Testimony
• Support Our Work

For more than 25 years, the U.S. National Toxicology Program (NTP) has used your tax dollars to poison small animals with massive doses of pesticides, drugs, and industrial chemicals to try to determine if these substances cause cancer and other disorders. In these tests, rats and mice are forced to consume food or drinking water laced with test chemicals, have chemicals pumped down their throats and into their stomachs, or are stuffed into restraint tubes and forced to inhale chemical vapors.

The NTP conducts several different types of animal tests. In general toxicology screens, rats and mice are exposed to chemicals for 14 to 90 days. Since these screens are often used to determine the "maximum tolerated dose" for longer studies, they can inflict intense suffering on animals before they die. In reproductive and developmental studies, rats and mice are exposed to chemicals during reproduction and pregnancy, resulting in offspring who—if they survive at all—often have serious developmental abnormalities or debilitating physical deformities.

However, the NTP's primary research method is the long-term toxicology and cancer study, in which rats and mice are exposed to chemicals every day of their lives for up to two years. And as if that weren't enough, they are often given doses that are so high that they cause toxicity—producing suffering over and above that caused by tumor growth and disease. Perhaps not surprisingly, the NTP reports that as many as 70 percent of animals might not even survive until the end of a two-year cancer study.

Just one of these studies takes approximately five years to design, conduct, and interpret, kills as many as 860 animals, and costs up to $4 million. Yet despite these enormous costs to animals and American taxpayers, the chief of the NTP's experimental pathology laboratory has admitted, "[W]e don't know what the findings really mean." PETA conducted its own analysis of the NTP's rodent cancer testing program, the complete results of which are published in our report "Wasted Money, Wasted Lives: A Layperson's Guide to the Problems With Rodent Cancer Studies and the National Toxicology Program." Based on our review of all 502 federally funded and conducted lifetime rodent cancer studies published on the NTP Web site as of January 2006 and the more than 25 years of published scientific literature on this subject, we have determined that much of the U.S. government's more than $1 billion investment in the NTP rodent cancer-testing program has been wasted. For example, NTP funds have been used to underwrite studies that:

• are judged to be utterly "inadequate" or to produce "equivocal" (ambiguous) results, which are of no use to health authorities.
• produce such dubious and conflicting results that more than 75 percent of NTP-tested chemicals are not even classified as to their cancer risk to humans or are lumped into such meaningless categories as "possible" human carcinogens or "unclassifiable" as to human cancer risk—designations that do nothing to enhance public health or worker protection.
• have been shown by other scientists to produce consistent and reproducible results only 57 percent of the time when the same chemicals are tested repeatedly using the same method—a result that could almost be achieved simply by tossing a coin.

History also reveals that critical public health and worker protection measures related to cigarette smoke, asbestos, benzene, and other cancer-causing substances were delayed for many years because of misplaced trust in animal tests, which could not easily replicate cancerous effects that had already been documented in people. If standard animal tests failed to readily identify these well-known human carcinogens, how many other dangerous chemicals are Americans being exposed to today because of misleading animal data?

The NTP continually solicits nominations of chemicals to be tested not only from scientists but also from the general public. This has led to animal tests being conducted on everything from naturally occurring substances such as green tea extract and locust bean gum to drugs that are already FDA-approved such as Prozac. In fact, Prozac was nominated for testing by a single anonymous individual who did not even provide a reason.

As Dr. Joshua Lederberg, a Nobel laureate in medicine, stated in 1981, "[I]t is simply not possible with all the animals in the world to go through new chemicals in the blind way that we have at the present time, and reach credible conclusions about the hazards to human health." Clearly, the time has come for fundamental changes in the NTP's approach to toxicity testing and for rodent cancer studies to be relegated to the history books.

How You Can Help
Congressional decisionmakers need to hear that you don't want any more of your tax dollars used to underwrite the National Toxicology Program's animal-testing programs. Please contact them and ask that these funds instead be redirected to support the development of new and improved non-animal test methods under the NTP's "21st Century Vision" program in order to more rapidly and effectively screen chemicals to determine which ones present a real cancer risk to people.

Please send polite letters to:

The Honorable Tom Harkin, Chair, The Honorable Arlen Specter, and Members
Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies
Committee on Appropriations
The Capitol, S-131
Washington, DC 20510
E-mail Chairman Harkin
E-mail Ranking Member Specter

The Honorable Dave Obey, Chair, The Honorable Todd Tiahrt, and Members
Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies
Committee on Appropriations
U.S. House of Representatives
The Capitol, H-218
Washington, DC 20515
E-mail Chairman Obey
E-mail Ranking Member Tiahrt