An animal welfare group has filed a claim with federal regulators alleging that a study examining alcohol’s effects on pigs led by an Alpert Medical School faculty member violated the Animal Welfare Act.
The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a nonprofit based in Washington that promotes alternatives to animal research, filed the complaint in December with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The group alleged that the study, conducted at Rhode Island Hospital, violated provisions of the Animal Welfare Act, multiple news outlets reported. The committee asked the USDA to investigate the study.
The USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service is currently reviewing the complaint to determine if researchers violated the Animal Welfare Act, said Tanya Espinosa, a public affairs specialist for APHIS. The USDA may then conduct an unannounced investigation of the research facilities, she said. If evidence of mistreatment is found, it could result in a range of punishments from a warning letter to license suspension or revocation, she added.
The committee’s complaint stated that the pigs in the study had reached the equivalent of “near lethal alcohol intoxication in humans.” The committee alleged that “the volume of alcohol is equivalent to an adult human consuming more than 20 shots of vodka per day,” according to the statement.
The experiment, led by Frank Sellke, professor of cardiothoracic surgery at the Med School, was published in the supplement to the journal Circulation Sept. 11, 2012. Researchers examined the effects of red wine and vodka on the cardiovascular system and sought to determine potential benefits of consuming moderate amounts of alcohol, according to the study.
“I think in the end, you have to ask yourself what we were possibly learning from baby piglets getting large quantities of alcohol,” said Kenneth Litwak, associate director of laboratory medicine for the committee.
But the study’s researchers pushed back against the committee’s allegations, denying that the pigs were mistreated.
No rules or regulations on ethical treatment of animal research subjects were broken during the conduction of the study, according to a statement released by Rhode Island Hospital on behalf of the study’s researchers. The pigs involved in the study — adolescents weighing an average of 50 pounds — “were either below the legal limit for human intoxication, or slightly above the legal limit,” according to the statement.
“It is important to note that pigs metabolize food and alcohol at a much faster rate than humans,” the release states.
“I think we performed the research in a very humane, logical and approved manner,” Sellke said. “There’s always a line that should not be crossed. I surely don’t think we crossed it in this case.”
In addition to filing the complaint, the committee conducted an advertisement campaign last month in Rhode Island protesting the experiments, Litwak said.
The ads encouraged passersby to contact the Rhode Island Department of Health and Human Services to request that the agency cut off funding for the research, Jeanne McVey, the committee’s media relations manager, wrote in an email to The Herald.
The ad campaign featured images accusing University researchers of “wasting federal funds on experiments giving alcohol to piglets,” the Providence Journal reported in December.
“We should be focusing on doing some real work with issues that are directly affecting Rhode Island right now, such as binge drinking,” McVey wrote.
Sellke said he thinks top funding groups and federal agencies involved with the research would agree that “this is an important question that cannot be answered in any other way, and animal research is important.”
- With additional reporting by Isobel Heck
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