Television presenter, best-selling author, and sepsis survivor Fern Britton teamed up with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) to call out cruel and wasteful sepsis experiments on animals.

Together, they sent an urgent letter to science minister Patrick Vallance and Home Office minister David Hanson over the callous animal testing practice. It urges them to end sepsis experiments on animals and shift resources toward better, human-relevant methods.

Sepsis experiments on animals: Fern Britton speaks out

Sepsis is a life-threatening reaction to infection that progresses rapidly. It kills more people in the UK each year than breast, bowel, and prostate cancer combined. In sepsis experiments, scientists commonly inject mice and rats with toxins or bacteria or subject them to invasive surgery. The animals may endure fever, chills, diarrhoea, difficulty breathing, lethargy, disorientation, shock, and multiple organ failure before they are killed.

Fern Britton, who contracted sepsis in 2016 after developing an infection following a routine hysterectomy, notes in the letter that:

despite decades of research, billions in funding, and the suffering of countless animals, we still lack effective, targeted treatments.

This failure costs the UK up to £15.6bn annually.

She continued:

Non-animal methods – including in vitro models, computational biology and use of human patient data – are humane, readily available, and far more representative of human biology.

Needless suffering from unreliable science

Mice and rats are intelligent, highly social animals who live in tight-knit groups and have complex social hierarchies. In UK laboratories, researchers typically cut animals open, puncture their intestines so faecal matter leaks into their abdomen, before stitching them up and leaving them to suffer as sepsis destroys their organs.

PETA notes that sepsis in humans is distinct from sepsis in other animals, making the results of such tests unreliable and misleading.

Fern Britton joins more than 27,000 others who have signed PETA’s petition. It urges the government to stop authorising the use of animals in sepsis experiments.

Feature image via the Canary

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