Physicians Committee Secures Policy Change to End Animal Testing

WASHINGTON, D.C.—The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine applauded a decision by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) to accept a new test method for evaluating the safety of pesticides—one the group helped facilitate more than a decade ago. Now, pesticide manufacturers can evaluate the toxicity of pesticide mixtures using the internationally recognized Globally Harmonized System (GHS) mixtures equation, a mathematical model that uses the existing toxicity values for the individual chemical components of a pesticide to determine the product’s threat from exposure.

The new approach allows manufacturers to forgo the acute oral toxicity tests performed on animals for certain pesticide mixtures. Dubbed “Lethal Dose 50 or LD50,” these tests in which animals are force-fed a toxin in increasing concentrations until half of them die, are estimated to kill approximately 20,000 animals a year.

“In 2014, the Physicians Committee brought the pesticide industry and EPA together to share data and hammer out an approach to evaluating pesticide safety without harming tens of thousands of animals. We also supported a pilot project to test the feasibility of this new approach,” said Dr. Shagun Krishna, director of toxicology at the Physicians Committee. “We have advocated for formal acceptance of the ‘calculation method’ for more than a decade.”

According to the group, the EPA’s adoption of the GHS mixtures equation represents an important regulatory milestone in their campaign to shift regulatory testing away from the use of animals and toward the use of modern methods including in vitro and computational approaches, which have been shown to be more predictive for human health outcomes.

“This is the direction toxicology is taking,” said Dr. Krishna, “and it’s about time.”