The Minister of Health Beatrice Lorenzin entered the debate between pro SA and animal rights activists, on the occasion of the conference "Animal experimentation, right to knowledge and health"
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Animal research is still indispensable, but it must be carried out only when really necessary and bearing in mind the objective of preserving the welfare of the animals involved, as well as the need to progressively reduce the number of those used, up to the complete replacement of the same with alternative practices and methods.
These are the words with which the Health Minister Beatrice Lorenzin entered the debate between pro SA and animal rights activists, on the occasion of the conference "Animal experimentation, right to knowledge and health", second meeting in the "Science, Innovation, Life and Health" cycle, underway in Giustiniani Palace.
“Unfortunately, animal testing is still essential even if we obviously want to show everyone that it is carried out only when necessary and with respect for animals. Animal testing has played a prominent role in numerous well-known experiments. The sacrifice of the latter has proved essential ", read more Lorenzin, who speaks of vivisection as a necessary evil in view of achieving the goal of people's health.
LAV comments favorably on the part regarding the goal of replacing vivisection and the development of alternative methods. And he returns to the problem of article 13, for which he has presided over the Ministry for days. “The natural and practical consequence of these statements by the Minister is the rewriting of the Legislative Decree currently in the Chambers which instead does not respect the criteria dictated by article 13 of the European Delegation Law as already certified by the Constitutional Affairs Commission of the Senate - declared Gianluca Felicetti, LAV president - the minimum but significant changes that the Government must respect, under penalty of being condemned for anti-constitutionality , I am precisely in tune with some of the principles expressed today by Mr Lorenzin who must now demonstrate coherence ”.
Furthermore, in an open letter to the President of the Senate and to all the Senators of the XII Hygiene and Health Commission, Michela Kuan, biologist, head of our Vivisection sector, explains because he did not participate in the Congress on animal testing in the Senate: it is not a neutral field of comparison, it is not an equal comparison.
"This is why I will not participate in the conference on animal testing formally promoted by the Senate Health Commission on Tuesday 14 January but, in fact, managed only by President De Biasi and life senator Elena Cattaneo, the only two parliamentarians foreseen in the program. And it is really strange that the request for participation has come, at least irritably, from the secretary of a life-long senator - indicating an email address of another person at the University of Milan for accreditation at the conference - and not from the Office of Presidency of the Commission ", complaint the biologist.
Kuan also notes that, of the seventeen names mentioned in the invitation between speakers and session coordinators, well fourteen are clearly in favor of animal testing. In response to an initiative that, conceived in this way, "discredits the institution of the Senate and is clearly carried out to try to accredit the substantial violation of article 13 of the Law 96-2013 of the European delegation", Lav Chiam called the most important names in scientific research without animals gathered together.
This is why a sort of counter-conference was organized, the day before that of the Senate, to explain above all to those who accuse the anti-vivisectionist world of being superficial, or lacking in scientific rigor, that surrogate methods exist and are effective and predictive.
Among others, Claude Reiss, physicist and cell biologist, molecular toxicologist, for 35 years research director at CNRS (French national scientific research center), Marcel Leist, Professor, University of Konstanz - Germany, specialist in bio-medicine and in vitro toxicology and director of the CAAT-EU Center for Alternative to Animal Testing, and Susanna Penco, biologist specializing in general pathology, lecturer and researcher at the University of Genoa, winner of the "Pietro Croce prize for the abolition of animal testing" in 2007 and of the "DNA award" in 2013. In a unanimous chorus they explained why animal testing is by no means a necessary evil.
Roberta Ragni
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