Girlie
July 31st, 2006, 05:39 PM
RabbitWise Alert
Rabbits on Treadmills
The Experiment
Medical experts agree that moderate exercise is good for pregnant women and their babies. This conclusion is based on both physician observation and more than 20 years of clinical studies. O’Hagan of Midwestern University in Chicago, however, is using $200,000 in government funds to investigate questions long settled by clinical research. In this case, O’Hagan wants to know how exercise affects the flow of blood to the uterus of pregnant women—but she isn’t examining pregnant women. Instead, O’Hagan is impregnating 60 rabbits, implanting probes and catheters into them, and forcing them to run on a motorized treadmill. At the end of her experiment, O’Hagan kills the rabbits, cuts them open, and examines their fetuses.
Our analysis of O’Hagan’s protocol shows that her experiment is cruel to animals, wasteful of public funds, flawed in design, and irrelevant to women’s health, and it should be ended immediately.
Read on, (http://www.femfatalities.com/treadmill.asp) and it will become painfully clear that O’Hagan’s experiment needs to stop. Then, please take a minute to find out what you can do to help end this cruel and wasteful experiment.
How You Can Help
Please write a polite letter to O’Hagan and tell her what you think of her rabbit experiment. Tell her that animal experiments will not help women make decisions about exercise during pregnancy. Tell her that her grant money would be better spent on human trials or on addressing diet and other lifestyle factors that could be corrected through education and outreach. Ask that she stop her rabbit study and return the remaining grant money to the NIH. Finally, tell O’Hagan that she needs to use non-animal research methods, such as Doppler ultrasound, to study exercise in human pregnancy:
Kathleen O’Hagan, Ph.D.
Department of Physiology
Midwestern University
555 31st St.
Downers Grove, IL 60515
630-515-6966
kohaga@midwestern.edu
Please write to Elizabeth G. Nabel, director of the NHLBI, and politely ask her to rescind the current grant to O’Hagan. Remind her that the NHLBI’s own Working Group on Hypertension in Pregnancy reported, “Animal models are of limited benefit because of significant differences in placentation among mammals, as well as differences in length of gestation and perhaps even posture between mammalian models and humans.” Point out that human-based research needs her organization’s support because, in its own words, “There are few obstetrician/gynecologists trained in rigorous clinical research and even fewer formal training programs”:
Elizabeth G. Nabel, M.D., Director
National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute
31 Center Dr.
Bldg. 31, Rm. 5A52 MSC 2486
Bethesda, MD 20892-2486
301-496-5166
301-402-0818 (fax)
nabele@nhlbi.nih.gov
You can also help by writing letters to the editors of Illinois newspapers, such as:
Chicago Tribune
Chicago Sun-Times
Rabbits on Treadmills
The Experiment
Medical experts agree that moderate exercise is good for pregnant women and their babies. This conclusion is based on both physician observation and more than 20 years of clinical studies. O’Hagan of Midwestern University in Chicago, however, is using $200,000 in government funds to investigate questions long settled by clinical research. In this case, O’Hagan wants to know how exercise affects the flow of blood to the uterus of pregnant women—but she isn’t examining pregnant women. Instead, O’Hagan is impregnating 60 rabbits, implanting probes and catheters into them, and forcing them to run on a motorized treadmill. At the end of her experiment, O’Hagan kills the rabbits, cuts them open, and examines their fetuses.
Our analysis of O’Hagan’s protocol shows that her experiment is cruel to animals, wasteful of public funds, flawed in design, and irrelevant to women’s health, and it should be ended immediately.
Read on, (http://www.femfatalities.com/treadmill.asp) and it will become painfully clear that O’Hagan’s experiment needs to stop. Then, please take a minute to find out what you can do to help end this cruel and wasteful experiment.
How You Can Help
Please write a polite letter to O’Hagan and tell her what you think of her rabbit experiment. Tell her that animal experiments will not help women make decisions about exercise during pregnancy. Tell her that her grant money would be better spent on human trials or on addressing diet and other lifestyle factors that could be corrected through education and outreach. Ask that she stop her rabbit study and return the remaining grant money to the NIH. Finally, tell O’Hagan that she needs to use non-animal research methods, such as Doppler ultrasound, to study exercise in human pregnancy:
Kathleen O’Hagan, Ph.D.
Department of Physiology
Midwestern University
555 31st St.
Downers Grove, IL 60515
630-515-6966
kohaga@midwestern.edu
Please write to Elizabeth G. Nabel, director of the NHLBI, and politely ask her to rescind the current grant to O’Hagan. Remind her that the NHLBI’s own Working Group on Hypertension in Pregnancy reported, “Animal models are of limited benefit because of significant differences in placentation among mammals, as well as differences in length of gestation and perhaps even posture between mammalian models and humans.” Point out that human-based research needs her organization’s support because, in its own words, “There are few obstetrician/gynecologists trained in rigorous clinical research and even fewer formal training programs”:
Elizabeth G. Nabel, M.D., Director
National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute
31 Center Dr.
Bldg. 31, Rm. 5A52 MSC 2486
Bethesda, MD 20892-2486
301-496-5166
301-402-0818 (fax)
nabele@nhlbi.nih.gov
You can also help by writing letters to the editors of Illinois newspapers, such as:
Chicago Tribune
Chicago Sun-Times