News Postings

The Home Office has released their annual report on animal use in the UK titled "Statistics of Scientific Procedures on Living Animals Great Britain 2010". Some points from the report are summarized below:

• Just over 3.7 million scientific procedures were started in Great Britain in 2010, increasing 3% (+105,000). This was largely due to an increase to 1.6 million procedures (+87,000, +6%) in breeding to produce genetically modified (GM) animals and harmful mutants (HM), mainly mice (+77,000).
• There was a decrease (-11%) in the numbers of procedures for safety testing (toxicology) to 391,000, with a higher proportion carried out to meet more than one legislative/regulatory requirement (72% compared with 68% in 2009). Most toxicology procedures are carried out in the commercial sector where the number of procedures also fell (-4%).
• The number of non-toxicology procedures increased 5% to 3.3 million, reflecting the higher numbers of procedures carried out in universities (+10%), particularly fundamental research. The increase for non-toxicology included further increases in cancer research (+8,700), immunological studies (+10,200), parasitology (+12,000) and pharmacology (+13,900) whilst pharmaceutical R&D continued to fall (-56,700).
• There were 1.0 million more procedures than in 2000 (+37%) mostly accounted for by breeding to produce GM and HM animals (+921,000, of which mice +811,000). Excluding such breeding, the total number of procedures was slightly higher than in 2000 (+4% or +89,000).

Please review the news link above for access to a pdf summary of the document as well as supplementary tables.