Reporting requirements of diseased monkeys used in state medical research under question

The Washington state health board shot down a proposal Thursday to require greater reporting of diseased monkeys used for research.

About a dozen animal rights activists from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and other organizations protested at the board's monthly meeting, which was held Thursday in Spokane. More than 30,000 Washington residents signed a petition to get the issue before the state health board.

If approved, the rule would have required primate research facilities in Washington to report certain diseases found in monkey populations directly to the state Department of Health. There are thousands of monkeys kept in fewer than a dozen primate research facilities in the state, which are all located in Western Washington.

There are more than 100 conditions that must be reported to the state Department of Health if a human is diagnosed with them. For livestock, similar disease tracking occurs within the state Department of Agriculture. Animal rights activists argue there is a gap of reporting for monkeys used in scientific experimentation across the state, where animal outbreaks of disease could occur without state regulators knowing.

PETA chief science adviser for primate experimentation Lisa Jones-Engel is concerned an outbreak within lab monkeys could spread to humans if regulators do not know what disease is spreading among these animals.

"We're not asking for any new reporting methods to be established. All we're asking for is that when these pathogens are detected in primates in these laboratories, that these labs then report it to the Department of Health," she said. "This is not earth shattering, this is not additional work, this is just common sense public health."

Jones-Engel used to be a researcher at the University of Washington National Primate Research Center until seven years ago. At PETA, she is now trying to shut down her former place of employment for what she sees as mistreatment of the monkeys she once experimented on. The scientist maintains the increased disease tracking proposal is not part of the effort to shut down primate research but to protect human populations in Washington.

The state Board of Health unanimously shot down the proposal Thursday on grounds current reporting requirements are sufficient to protect human populations. If an employee at one of these research facilities develops a reported illness from a research monkey, that disease is still reported to the Department of Health and the disease's origin to the facility could still be tracked.

These research facilities are also required by federal law to have a licensed veterinarian on site. If an animal becomes sick and has a lab-confirmed diagnosis of a condition that is spread between an animal to human, it gets reported to the federal Department of Agriculture's Reportable Animal Disease System, said Board of Health staff.

State Secretary of Health Dennis Worsham said requiring reporting to the Department of Health would be duplicative and cost the DoH resources.

"There's always that fear when you have multiple jurisdictions engaged that there are gaps in services or lack of communication on reporting networks. And through my many questions, I really was satisfied that I do not see a gap," he said.

Board of Health member Stephen Kutz said these types of exposures are taken seriously by research facilities.

"I either performed or supervised disease investigations for 25 years, and if any disease that a human had was traced back to a nonhuman source, that source was always followed up and mitigated in my experience, and so I don't know where and I can't see where the gap is," he said.

Jones-Engel called the board meeting an "absolute circus" and said PETA would continue to pursue stricter reporting for disease in research monkey populations.

"This was a bunch of people throwing up a smoke cloud to what was a very straightforward issue, and we're not done now," she said.

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