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posted by martyb on Friday May 05 2017, @12:16AM   Printer-friendly
from the monkey-business dept.

Mauritius, an island nation that is the world's second largest exporter of long-tailed macaques, has moved to allow scientific experimentation on the nonhuman primates locally:

The persistent fight by animal welfare activists to end nonhuman primate research has found its way to Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean two-thirds the size of Rhode Island. In the 1700s, Dutch and Portuguese seafarers introduced the long-tailed macaque to the island, where the animals thrived and, in recent decades, formed the basis of an export industry supplying biomedical labs in the developed world. Now, Mauritius has decided to get into the business of nonhuman primate experimentation itself even as such work is becoming increasingly constrained in North America and Europe. Last month the move touched off a heated debate in Mauritius's National Assembly about whether the government could adequately protect the macaques used in research and whether the new industry might endanger a far bigger lifeline for the island—tourism.

The debate is reverberating overseas. Activists, led by London-based Cruelty Free International, see the influence of Mauritius's five monkey breeding companies behind the government's February step allowing licenses to be issued for local research on island-bred macaques. (The new regulations also allow rabbit and rodent studies.) They contend that the companies are alarmed by a successful, high-pressure campaign to discourage commercial airlines from flying nonhuman primates from source countries such as Mauritius to research centers—and are trying to hedge their bets. The London group also argues that the new regulations, which amend the country's Animal Welfare Act, are invalid because they don't further the purpose of the original legislation.

Some scientists see it differently. Tipu Aziz, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom who says he was obliged by stringent U.K. animal welfare regulations to abandon studies of Parkinson's disease in long-tailed macaques, commends Mauritius's effort as a "forward-thinking" attempt to build up its biotech sector. But, he says, "They've got a lot of work ahead of them" to attract drug studies and basic research, noting that China has already established sophisticated nonhuman primate research centers that are attractive to Western customers.

[...] The captive-bred Mauritian macaques are valued because, as a result of their island isolation, they are free of simian viruses including B virus, which in rare cases has infected lab workers after bites, leaving them brain-damaged or dead. The animals' genetic makeup—in particular their patterns of expression of certain cell-surface proteins—also makes them useful models for studies of HIV.

Related: Should a Chimp Be Able to Sue Its Owner?
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NIH Plans To Lift Ban On Research Funds For Human-Animal Chimera Embryos
Ebola Vaccine for Great Apes Hindered by Chimpanzee Research Restrictions
PETA Pushes the US to Extend "Threatened" Species Protections to Research Animals


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by idiot_king on Friday May 05 2017, @02:40AM (1 child)

    by idiot_king (6587) on Friday May 05 2017, @02:40AM (#504650)

    Please keep your shitty trolling to where they belong, places like 4chan and the Republican Party.
    Thanks.

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  • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 05 2017, @03:18AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 05 2017, @03:18AM (#504659)

    Fuck you up the ass, cunt.