06/18/21 Death by injection of Botox into the abdomen
Animal Friends Croatia are asking the European Medicines Agency to abolish cruel tests
- Action Week June 21-26: to ban a gruesome test for which there are alternatives
Animal Friends Croatia, a member of the European Coalition to End Animal Experimentation (ECEAE), is joining animal rights organizations across Europe to mark Action Week from 21 to 26 June to protest the continued use of mice in cruel Botox testing. "We call on the European Medicines Agency (EMA) to remove the LD50 test on mice from European regulations, which is carried out to test the smoothing of facial wrinkles. It is unacceptable that animals that can feel continue to suffer a painful death due to a product that is widely used for cosmetic purposes, despite the fact that non-animal technologies are available,” said Animal Friends Croatia.
Treatments with Botox, a nerve poison that is used not only in medicine but also in large quantities for cosmetic purposes, are increasingly present in Croatia. "It is paradoxical that treatment with this poison not only has short-term effects on existing wrinkles but also causes the formation of new wrinkles. It is also horrible that each new batch of Botox is tested on animals separately, so the victims of beauty are counted in hundreds of thousands of painful deaths", explain Animal Friends Croatia.
Each batch of Botox is tested in the infamous and extremely painful LD50 toxicity test, which is banned in many countries and considered unscientific by scientists themselves. Mice are injected with various doses of Botox into the abdominal cavity to determine which dose is lethal to half of the animals tested. The animals are exposed to terrible pain, suffer from progressive paralysis, stumble and drift from one side to the other until they stop walking. Some face a severe breathing problem before dying of suffocation after three or four days of suffering. It is estimated that around 400,000 mice in Europe are subjected to this horrific death each year.
Thanks to pressure from animal welfare organizations, after Allergan, two more global companies, Merz and Ipsen, switched to cell-based Botox testing in 2015 and 2018, replacing most of their animal testing. However, some testing of these companies is still conducted on animals. One of the manufacturers that still use the cruel LD50 test is Sloan Pharma. In 2019 alone, that company conducted the LD50 test on 46,800 mice in Germany. The necessity of a legal ban is obvious given that companies, even though they have had the choice to test Botox methods without using animals for a decade, continue to torture and kill animals.
The European Pharmacopoeia, which regulates the serial testing of Botox products, allows a number of animal-free testing methods but also allows the infamous LD50 test on mice. ECEAE member organizations, including Animal Friends Croatia, are calling on the European Medicines Agency to abolish the mouse test from the Pharmacopoeia. They also call for the non-use of Botox until they stop animal testing, as well as for the general purchase of products that are more effective and, more importantly, more ethical because they have not been tested on animals.
Apart from the stand of the Animal Friends Croatia Association, which will be set up on Saturday, June 19, 2021, at Zagreb's Petar Preradović Square, a video about Botox testing can also be seen at afcroatia, where you can get more information about animal testing and how not to support it.