Jerusalem

Procedures designed to supervise animal experiments in Israel have not been properly implemented, says the government's main watchdog.

In a strongly worded report released on 29 June, the state comptroller said that processes written into a 1994 law to govern animal experimentation have never come into effect.

The National Regulatory Council on Animal Trials, which was set up in 1994 to establish rules for experiments on animals and to oversee them in universities and other research labs, has not operated in full accordance with the law, the report says.

The animal-welfare law states that scientists should only use animals in experiments if they can demonstrate that no alternatives are available. It says they should restrict the number of animals used to a minimum and never make laboratory animals suffer unnecessarily. “In practice, the issue of alternatives has not advanced much during the council's tenure,” the report finds.

The National Committee to Approve Animal Experiments, which the council established to apply the law, has not functioned since its last chairman resigned two years ago, the report says. Since then, individual institutions have established internal review committees to oversee their experiments, as the law permits. But the comptroller says that these committees have not represented non-biologists, as the law requires.

Ehud Ziv, a physician at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Medical School who became chair of the council on 1 July, says he welcomes the comptroller's report. He disputes the idea that the council has had no effect, however, citing a continuing decline in the number of animals used in individual experiments. In 2002, some 290,000 animals were used in experiments at 48 institutions in the country, according to figures collected by the council.

Some biologists sought to play down the comptroller's criticisms. “It's a standard report,” says Alex Tsafriri, a biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. Tsafriri is chairman of the Interuniversity Forum for Medical Sciences in Israel, a body set up by Israeli universities to defend the use of animals in science. “It's not surprising to find some creases in the implementation of a ten-year-old law.”