Ask the University of Mississippi Medical Center to End the Use of Pigs in its Physiology Lab

Wikimedia Commons

Please click HERE to sign petition

Background | Source PCRM

Medical training at UMC involves cutting into live, anesthetized pigs and performing cardiovascular procedures. Students place catheters in the veins of the pigs, block the animals’ arteries, and inject them with drugs. Students then open the pigs’ chest cavities and manipulate the hearts. After the training, the animals are killed.

Ninety-eight percent of U.S. and Canadian medical schools exclusively use nonanimal education methods. UMC currently operates a simulation center and could immediately replace its use of animals immediately.

Please take a minute to ask University of Mississippi Medical Center School of Medicine dean James E. Keeton, M.D., and University of Mississippi chancellor Daniel W. Jones, M.D., to stop the use of live pigs in the school’s medical student physiology lab. We have provided text for you, but if you decide to write your own message, please be polite and encouraging. Here are some talking points:

1. Please replace the use of animals in UMMC’s physiology lab.
2. Anatomical and physiological differences between pigs and humans render this type of training suboptimal.
3. UMMC is one of only seven schools in the United States and Canada that still use live animals for training.
4. High-fidelity human-patient simulators more accurately represent human anatomy and allow for repetitive training.
5. UMMC already has a state-of-the-art simulation center than can easily provide nonanimal training methods.

pigs are pigs,
but man is
the swine.
and his treatment
of other beings,
is cruel and
way out of line!!!!!

Karen Lyons Kalmenson