By Cara Murez
HealthDay Reporter
FRIDAY, May 5, 2023 (HealthDay News) — The United States must address the shortage of research monkeys by expanding breeding programs while developing alternatives to monkey testing, a panel of experts said in a published report. Thursday.
The panel from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine focused on NIH-funded research critical to responding to public health emergencies like COVID-19.
“If the United States is going to produce high-impact biomedical research and have a research infrastructure capable of responding to the next public health crisis, now is the time to strengthen the systems we need for nonhuman primate research,” said the committee chair Dr. Kenneth Ramos, assistant vice chancellor for health services at Texas A&M University, in a press release announcing the new report.
Although the United States funds nonhuman primate colonies at domestic centers, it also relies on imported primates raised for research.
Historically, some of those primates have come from China, but in 2020 that country stopped exporting research monkeys, the Associated Press reported, leading to a 20% drop in imports of one species in particular, cynomolgus macaques.
This was also when primates were especially needed for COVID studies.
Supplies were also affected when the United States filed charges to stop a Cambodian smuggling ring that was accused of sending endangered wild monkeys for research, the access point informed.
Monkeys are useful in life-saving research, especially in infectious diseases and neuroscience, because of their similarities to people.
Still, using them is also controversial. The NIH no longer uses humans’ closest relatives, chimpanzees, in invasive research because of that controversy, the access point informed.
According to the report, about 64% of NIH-funded researchers had trouble getting primates for their work.
More information
The National Institutes of Health has more information on the animals used in the research.
SOURCE: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, press release, May 4, 2023; Associated Press
—————————————————-
Source link