January 1, 2008
Killing Dogs in Training of Doctors Is to End
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/01/health/research/01dog.html
By next month, all American medical schools will have abandoned a
time-honored method of teaching cardiology: operating on dogs to
examine their beating hearts, and disposing of them after the lesson.
Case Western Reserve School of Medicine was the last to use the
method, but the dean, Dr. Pamela Davis, said it would no longer
do so after this month.
On Nov. 19, New York Medical College in Valhalla joined New York's
11 other medical schools and announced that it would close its dog
laboratory.
Among the 126 American medical schools, 11 still sacrifice animals
for teaching, according to the Physicians Committee for Responsible
Medicine, an advocacy group that tracks the practice. Other than
Case, none of them use dogs.
Francis Belloni, a dean at New York Medical College, said his students
now used echocardiograms to study heart function, and the subjects
were live medical students rather than live dogs. Dr. Belloni said the
use of animals was not done lightly and had value, but added that
students would "become just as good doctors without it."
|
