Washington

Speed restrictions? Questions are being raised over a study that gives cats amphetamines. Credit: MICHAEL PODELL

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) is being sued over a research project that involves giving amphetamines to cats infected with the feline equivalent of HIV.

The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), a Washington-based pressure group that opposes animal experiments and advocates preventative health care, launched the action on 27 December. Using the Freedom of Information Act, it wants to force the NIH to release all the documents relating to the grant proposal made for the project.

The study is led by Michael Podell, a veterinarian at Ohio State University in Columbus, who is investigating the interactions between drug abuse and AIDS.

Podell won a five-year grant worth $1.7 million from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, part of the NIH, in autumn 2000 to study neurological changes in cats infected with feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV) and exposed to high doses of methamphetamine, the recreational drug more commonly known as speed.

The PCRM claims that the study is cruel and scientifically unnecessary, and wants the NIH to release more information about the project, including the outcome of Podell's pilot studies.

Podell, the NIH and Ohio State University have each declined to comment on the lawsuit. But in a previous statement, Podell said that his feline study will help to establish how HIV and drug abuse cause brain damage in human patients.

Murry Cohen, a psychiatrist affiliated with the PCRM, says that the feline model is too dissimilar from the human infection to yield clinically relevant information.

But Dennis Kolson, a neurologist at the University of Pennsylvania, says: “There are so few in vivo model systems for retroviral diseases like HIV that we have to utilize each one to its fullest extent, and the FIV system fits into that, as does the primate model.”