For decades, animal advocates have been campaigning to end the use of live animals to teach students medical procedures at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS) in Bethesda, Md., and their work has finally paid off.
USUHS, the only military medical school in the U.S., has announced it will stop using live animals in its training programs and will now be using simulators to teach surgical skills and physiology, reports the AP. The school said it began phasing out the use of live animals in 2000 with the opening of the National Capital Area Medical Simulation Center.
A huge thank you to Care2 members who signed petitions urging the military to end this horrific practice.
The Physician’s Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) and other medical professionals have been working on this issue for years in an effort to convince the school to stop using and killing dogs, ferrets, gerbils and pigs, among other animals, to teach medical students surgical procedures, which most other schools have stopped doing. Unfortunately for students at USUHS who objected to the use of animals, they couldn’t just refuse to participate or transfer out because of their military obligations.
“We are shocked and we didn’t think they would change. It’s pretty exciting,” Jeanne Stuart McVey, a spokeswoman for PCRM, told the Washington Post.
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