Sadists in white coats
The US Department of Agriculture made cannibals out of cats, and then killed them
All this is for the sake of researching a parasitic disease that infects half of the world's population
Evgenia Shcherbina, "The Attic"
An American non-governmental organization claims that the US Department of Agriculture has been conducting cruel and inappropriate experiments on cats and dogs for many years. In particular, employees of the department fed cats and dogs with the same animals, infected them with toxoplasma, and then killed them. All this was done, according to representatives of the Ministry of Agriculture, for the health of Americans.
The White Coat Waste Project (this name can be translated as "Scum in white coats") is a non–profit organization that unites, according to its members, about 400,000 animal lovers and aims to stop experiments on animals paid for from the country's budget in the United States. On March 20, the project published a report on the experiments of the US Department of Agriculture on research of toxoplasmosis – one of the most common parasitic diseases.
It is caused by a single-celled parasite toxoplasma (Toxoplasma gondii), which is interesting because it can infect almost any tissues of animals, birds and humans. Despite the fact that from a third to half of all people on the planet are infected with toxoplasma, in most cases the disease passes without a trace for health. However, in some cases, infected people can spend several weeks with fever, headaches and muscle pains, painful lymph nodes, vomiting, convulsions and other unpleasant consequences. Also, this disease is dangerous for pregnant women, as it can be transmitted to the fetus. With congenital toxoplasmosis, a child may die in the womb or after birth from a common infection, acquire damage to the nervous system, eyes and other organs and oligophrenia. In addition, toxoplasma can reduce the mental abilities of schoolchildren.
People can get infected with toxoplasma in various ways, for example through poorly fried meat or raw shellfish, through unpasteurized goat's milk, as well as after contact with cat excrement. Cats play the most important role in the life of the parasite: only in them the toxoplasm can go through a full life cycle. Together with the excrement, the animal secretes millions of similar parasites.
According to the report, the US Department of Agriculture began experiments with cats in 1982, and most of them (121) were conducted until 2000 in the Laboratory of Parasitic Animal Diseases in Maryland. In total, about 4 thousand cats and 400 dogs participated in them. There were several types of experiments. Firstly, the isolation of cysts is a temporary form of existence of a unicellular, in which it is in a protective shell. For this purpose, up to 100 kittens aged about eight weeks were used every year, which were fed meat infected with toxoplasma. Then the scientists collected parasite cysts from their excrement to use them in further experiments. Although the kittens remained healthy, they were killed and burned because they were no longer needed.
Secondly, cats, dogs and laboratory mice were fed tissues (brains, hearts and tongues) of other cats and dogs to check whether they would become infected with the parasite through the tissues. According to the report, either homeless animals were selected for this purpose, or from shelters in Africa and Latin America, or they were bought at meat markets in China and Vietnam. According to the authors of the report, 2684 animals (82% of all) were fed with the tissues of their relatives. Studies based on the results of such experiments are in the public domain.
Finally, in the third type of experiments, animals were deliberately infected with a large number of parasites in order to see the body's reaction to the infection. As a rule, the animals died after that.
The authors of the report state that such experiments are cruel, inappropriate and have nothing to do with public health. Toxoplasma can be detected by tests on mice, analysis of antibodies in the blood or detection of DNA parasites using polymerase chain reaction. In addition, only one infected animal secretes millions of cysts, so there was no need to use and kill hundreds of animals for these purposes. In addition, in nature, cats and dogs do not feed on relatives, so there is simply no point in experiments of this kind.
A representative of the US Department of Agriculture in a conversation with Time magazine did not comment on the report. "Service... continues to evaluate how best to conduct toxoplasmosis research for the sake of preserving the health of Americans. The US Department of Agriculture continues to protect the safety of food supplies and strictly adheres to ethical standards," the publication quotes him as saying. There are no comments on this report on the website and in the official accounts of the Ministry in social networks. The ministry also declined to comment to the New York Post.
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