For Rapid Launch:
November 21, 2022
Contact:
Amanda Hays 202-483-7382
Boston – This morning, PETA filed a criticism with the Occupational Security and Well being Administration (OSHA) alerting the company to obvious employee security violations on the Harvard Medical Faculty laboratory of experimenter Margaret Livingstone. Information obtained by PETA present that veterinary workers reported Livingstone for failing to put on federally mandated private protecting gear (PPE) whereas experimenting on a restrained monkey, inserting herself and her employees vulnerable to contracting one of many many pathogens which can be transmissible from monkeys to people.
Monkeys in U.S. laboratories have been discovered to be contaminated with herpes B—a illness that’s benign and largely asymptomatic in monkeys however has a fatality charge of larger than 70% in people if not handled correctly—in addition to campylobacter, cholera, hepatitis, MRSA, salmonella, tuberculosis, West Nile virus, and different pathogens and illnesses. Along with the illness threat posed by Livingstone’s failure to put on PPE, her laboratory has endangered workers and animals by permitting a monkey to flee from a cage, resulting in a combat with one other harassed monkey that precipitated accidents so extreme that one animal’s finger needed to be amputated.
“It’s just about unimaginable to ensure that monkeys are freed from all infectious brokers, so Margaret Livingstone’s PPE blunder risked her personal well being and that of her workers,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “PETA is asking on OSHA to research Livingstone’s failure to adjust to even probably the most minimal security tips.”
Livingstone’s experiments contain eradicating toddler monkeys from their moms at beginning, caging them alone, and both distorting their imaginative and prescient with varied gadgets or by no means permitting them to see a human or monkey face. She has additionally sewn toddler monkeys’ eyelids shut. In lots of experiments, the monkeys’ heads are immobilized utilizing helmets, chin straps, and chunk bars, and a few of the animals are killed and dissected. Livingstone has carried out these sensory-deprivation experiments on monkeys for 40 years and, since 1998, has collected $32 million in taxpayer cash from the Nationwide Institutes of Well being to bankroll them—all with out producing any cures or therapies for people.
PETA—whose motto reads, partially, that “animals are usually not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For extra info on PETA’s investigative newsgathering and reporting, please go to PETA.org or observe the group on Twitter, Fb, or Instagram.