National Toxicology Program

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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 this enormous cost 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 recently 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, together with 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 a waste, 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 be achieved by simply 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 as a result of misleading animal data?

As Dr. Joshua Lederberg, Nobel laureate in medicine, stated in 1981, “It is simply not possible with all the animals in the world to go through chemicals in the blind way we have at the present time, and reach credible conclusions about the hazards to human health.” Clearly, the time has come for fundamental changes to the NTP's approach to cancer testing and for rodent cancer studies to be relegated to the trash bin of history.

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 rodent-cancer testing program. 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 detect which ones present a real cancer risk to people.

Please send polite letters to:

The Honorable Arlen Specter, Chair, The Honorable Tom Harkin, and Members
Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies
Committee on Appropriations
U.S. Senate, SD-184
Washington, DC 20510
E-mail Chairman Specter
E-mail Ranking Member Harkin

The Honorable Ralph Regula, Chair, The Honorable David Obey, and Members
Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies
Committee on Appropriations
U.S. House of Representatives
Rayburn Building, Rm. 2358
Washington, DC 20515-6024
E-mail Chairman Regula
E-mail Ranking Member Obey