Use of Animals in Testing
In veterinary practice, much of our work is preventative and includes vaccination.
The production of these vaccines creates various animal welfare concerns because each batch of vaccines has to be tested for each of the following:
- safety – the vaccine should not cause adverse effects, e.g. a modified live vaccine should not revert to virulence; with a killed vaccine, the adjuvant should not cause a local reaction
- purity – no additional substances that might cause adverse effects, e.g. few or no residual proteins from the cells in which the vaccine virus was grown, and which might cause an anaphylactic reaction in your patient
- potency – enough of the antigen in question, sufficient to create an immune response
- efficacy – adequate protective immune response.
If the batch is not tested in all these ways, the risk is that the animals you vaccinate in practice either will not develop a satisfactory immune response, or may suffer adverse effects.
Some of that testing can be achieved using in vitro testing, not live animals. However, some live animals must be used and may suffer a great deal.
The welfare concern here is the choice of end-point. A humane endpoint is the moment in the study when an experimental animal’s suffering is terminated by, e.g. analgesia, euthanasia, removing from the study.