Cruelty-free Premarin rival

April 1, 1999 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1999:

Premarin, the Wyeth-Ayerst
estrogen drug made from pregnant
mares’ urine, gained a rival on March
26 when the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration authorized Duramed
Pharmaceuticals to sell Cenestin, an
estrogen made of soy and yam extracts,
to treat menopausal symptoms.
Plant-based estrogens were
already available, but Premarin was
the only product sold as a wide-spectrum
menopausal remedy. Duramed
tried to introduce Cenestin as a generic
substitute for Premarin; blocked by
Wyeth-Ayerst legal action, it will now
offer Cenestin as a generic alternative.
Premarin has been widely
boycotted since soon after ANIMAL
PEOPLE revealed in April 1993 that
the perpetually pregnant mares used in
making it spend two-thirds of their
lives tethered in stalls, while their foals
are usually sold for horsemeat.

Medicine

Pigs blamed for Malaysian crisis

April 1, 1999 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1999:

KUALA LUMPUR––The ongoing
Asian fiscal crisis, global pork price collapse,
and panic in Malaysia over lethal disease outbreaks
might matter least to the pigs taking
the brunt of the human terror. Come good
times or bad for humans, pigs get killed.
As March ended, nearly 3,000
Malaysian troops shot or gassed pigs in ditches,
in districts where as many as 900 farmers
allegedly left the animals to starve or roam.
Eleven thousand villagers were
evacuated before the shooting began.
One million pigs were to be killed
by April 1, but the massacre reportedly
progessed at a fraction of the intended speed
due to pigs putting up frantic resistance.

Is CSU trying to hide sources of greyhounds found in labs?

March 1, 1999 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1999:

DENVER––A Colorado bill appearing to attempt to
circumvent the record-keeping requirements of the federal
Animal Welfare Act cleared the state house on February 10 and
is pending in the state senate as SB 1228.
Reported Dan Luzadder of the Rocky Mountain News,
“Representative Steve Johnson, R-Fort Collins, a veterinarian
and sponsor of the bill, said Colorado State University requested
the bill to maintain confidentiality among clients and vets” at the
CSU teaching hospital.
The bill seeks to exempt CSU from having to produce
veterinary records pertaining to owned animals under the state
Freedom of Information Act, unless the records are requested by
the owners themselves.

PETA slams EDF testing deal with chemical makers

March 1, 1999 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1999:

WASHINGTON D.C.––People for
the Ethical Treatment of Animals cofounder
Alex Pacheco threw a January haymaker at
the Environmental Defense Fund’s greatest
victory in 32 years of campaigning for more
stringent chemical safety standards.
EDF and the Chemical Manufacturers
Association on January 27 jointly
announced a protocol under which the chemical
industry will spend more than $1 billion to
safety-test 2,800 high production volume
chemicals, looking out for health effects
which were mostly not known when they
were first approved.
But as the announcement was pending,
Pacheco warned PETA donors that the
project would involve “millions of animals––
rabbits, guinea pigs, birds, rats, and fish––
over the next six years.”

Still no injectable birth control for dogs and cats

October 1, 1998 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1998:

Hopes for an inexpensive injection
sterilant for dogs and cats were prematurely
raised worldwide in early September by a
CNN report about an experimental contraceptive
vaccine for female rodents developed by
California researcher Jeff Bleil.
In theory, the Bleil vaccine could
work in dogs and cats, as CNN noted, but
Bleil so far has tested it only in mice and rats,
and he is reportedly still at least two years
from being able to market it for laboratory
mouse population control, his first objective.
He apparently hasn’t begun work yet to adapt
the product for use with other animals.
Zonagen Inc., of Massachusetts,
announced in 1990, 1991 and 1994 that it had
almost perfected a similar contraceptive vaccine,
called Zonavax, for female dogs and
cats, but there has been no further word of it.

RABIES UPDATES

October 1, 1998 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1998:

Afflicting the Atlantic seaboard
and New England since 1976, the midAtlantic
raccoon rabies pandemic shows signs
of containment through the escalating use of
Raboral, an oral vaccine developed by the
Wistar Institute of Philadelphia. Used successfuly
against fox rabies in Europe for more
than 20 years, Raboral has kept Cape Cod
free of rabies since 1993, Alison Robbins,
DVM, of the Tufts University School of
Veterinary Medicine announced in late
August. Earlier, Texas officials credited
Raboral with stopping the only recorded mass
outbreak of rabies in coyotes. The Tufts program
is now expanding to vaccinate the raccoons
of Plymouth, Wareham, and Carver,
and as funding becomes available, Massa –
chusetts Department of Public Health

Message from Jakarta

June 1, 1998 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1998:

JAKARTA, Indonesia––As dogs, cats, monkeys,
students, and looters are shot in Indonesian streets, against a
backdrop of razed stores, ethnic mayhem, and jungles ablaze
across Kalimantan and Malaysia, Hindu myth almost seems to
explain it all––especially amid the additional reverberations of
five nuclear tests in the Rajasthan desert of India.
The blasts sent a warning to Pakistan, 97% Islamic,
that added to the stress in Indonesia, too, 87% Islamic.
“It is said that when great evil stalks the earth,”
explains Nanditha C. Krishna, honorary director of the C.P.
Ramaswami Aiyar Foundation in Chennai, India, “Vishnu will
appear as Kalki, and the world will go up in flames.”

Classroom dissection

May 1, 1998 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1998:

New curriculums introduced this academic
year exempted first-year medical students from live
pig dissection at the St. Louis University School of
Medicine and made participation in live dog dissection
optional at the University of Colorado School of
M e d i c i n e. The new St. Louis University curriculum
introduces observations of demonstration surgery on
live pigs at the second-year level, and hands-on work
as an option later. About 35 pigs were spared by the
change, pharmacology and physiology chair Thomas
C. Westfall told James Ritchie of the St. Louis PostDispatch.
The University of Colorado policy amendment
allows medical students to opt out of three 10-
week dog laboratories traditionally held each spring.
An Islamic student, Safia Rubaii, in 1993 challenged
mandatory participation as an alleged violation of her
faith, and sued the university Health Sciences Center
when the administration threatened to flunk her. In
1995, recalled Denver Post medical writer Ann
Schrader, “University officials agreed to pay Rubaii
$95,000, and promised to establish a review process to
accommodate future students whose religious beliefs
don’t allow doing experiments on animals.”

Regeneration breakthrough in mice

March 1, 1998 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1998:

PHILADELPHIA––The key to human
regrowth of lost or injured limbs and organs may
have been found by accident in connection with
genetically modifying mice for disease research,
immunologist Ellen Heber-Katz of the Wistar
Institute indicated in a February 16 address to the
American Association for the Advancement of
Science.
Heber-Katz was studying multiple sclerosis
using the fairly common MRL strain of custom-bred
research mouse, she said, when she
found that ID holes punched in her subjects’ ears
quickly healed over without a trace. Removing
bits of their tails and livers brought similar
results: new parts grew, matching the old.

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