Suchergebnisse

In the beginning of the year 2005, the European Commission published the fourth statistical report on the number of laboratory animals used in the EU Member States in the year 2002. A total of 10,731,020 experimental animals was reported, the majority of which were mice, rats and fish. In comparison to 1999, the year of the previous data collection, this is an increase by over 900,000 animals, which is mainly attributed to an increased use in fish. As in the previous years, France, the United Kingdom and Germany were the Member States that reported the highest numbers of laboratory animals. 4.5 million animals were used for the development, production and quality control of products for human medicine, dentistry and veterinary medicine and 1 million animals in toxicological and safety evaluations. 3.7 million animals were used in fundamental studies, and therefore are not covered by the scope of Council Directive 86/609/EEC on the protection of laboratory animals. This regulatory gap leaving more than a third of the laboratory animals used in the European Union without protection by EU legislation is unacceptable and should be closed during a revision of the Directive. All national authorities submitted some kind of explanatory notes alongside their national tables. In the article, an extensive summary and discussion of the contents of these notes is presented. Germany, Austria, Finland report on providing financial support for the development of alternative methods. The numbers put forward in the fourth EU statistical show that such support is desperately needed

A brief overview is given of the data published in the third report on the number of animals used for scientific purposes in the European Union (EU), in 1999. In comparison to the second EU statistical report, the meaningfulness of the data has been greatly improved, since 14 EU Member States have now used the "EU tables". Even though the total number of animals officially reported in the EU for 1999 (9.81 million animals) is lower than the number reported for 1996 in the second report (11.65 million animals), an increase in animal numbers was observed in several Member States. Repeatedly, the use of transgenic animals was considered to be the cause for this. Most national authorities provided some comments on the data they submitted. However, the quality of these accompanying notes varies considerably, with the comments provided by The Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, Austria, Denmark and the United Kingdom containing the most-detailed remarks on their data

The risk assessment of nano-sized materials (NM) currently suffers from great uncertainties regarding their putative toxicity for humans and the environment. An extensive amount of the respective original research literature has to be evaluated before a targeted and hypothesis-driven Environmental and Health Safety research can be stipulated. Furthermore, to comply with the European animal protection legislation in vitro testing has to be preferred whenever possible. Against this background, there is the need for tools that enable producers of NM and risk assessors for a fast and comprehensive data retrieval, thereby linking the 3Rs principle to the hazard identification of NM. Here we report on the development of a knowledge-based search engine that is tailored to the particular needs of risk assessors in the area of NM. Comprehensive retrieval of data from studies utilising in vitro as well as in vivo methods relying on the PubMed database is presented exemplarily with a titanium dioxide case study. A fast, relevant and reliable information retrieval is of paramount importance for the scientific community dedicated to develop safe NM in various product areas, and for risk assessors obliged to identify data gaps, to define additional data requirements for approval of NM and to create strategies for integrated testing using alternative methods.