The White Coat Waste Project has reached hundreds of thousands of people with recently published letters to the editor about wasteful taxpayer-funded animal experiments.

On the heels of the important announcement that Washington University in St. Louis’ medical school is finally ending it’s cruel cat labs in favor of high-tech human simulators, WCW pointed out how Washington University is still using government money–nearly $200 million from the NIH alone each year–for cruel experiments on dogs, monkeys, and other animals. Our VP of Advocacy and Public Policy, Justin Goodman, wrote in a letter to the editor published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

“This enormous expense to the public is perplexing and unjustifiable. Even the NIH wrote in its current five-year strategic plan that “animal models often fail to provide good ways to mimic disease or predict how drugs will work in humans, resulting in much wasted time and money while patients wait for therapies.” High-tech research technologies like “organs-on-chips” are cheaper, faster and more accurate.”

We also weighed in on the ongoing controversy about the abuse of monkeys in experiments at the University of Washington in Seattle. We exposed details about waste and abuse in the school’s laboratories–including taxpayer-funded STD and sex lube  experiments on monkeys–in a letter to the editor published in The Daily at the University of Washington:

“According to UW, it confines 3,388 primates in its laboratories, many of whom are used in painful and distressful experiments. This year alone, UW’s primate center received $13 million in federal funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) just for operating expenses, and another $65 million in mostly public money for individual primate experiments.

Not only are these experiments expensive and cruel, they’re also a waste of scarce taxpayer research funding.”

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