Will REACH result in more animal testing?
The aim of REACH is to ensure that health and environment (including animals) are protected from adverse effects due to dangerous chemical substances. Acquiring the necessary knowledge on the properties of substances will entail some animal testing.
However, REACH has been designed to reduce animal testing to the absolute minimum. Unnecessary tests are avoided due to the obligation to share all data generated through testing on vertebrate animals, and by the provision that for large volume substances testing proposals must be approved by the Agency before new test on animals will be performed. This will ensure that the endpoints studied are relevant, that the scientific validity of the research is sufficiently high, and that the testing programme does not duplicate other studies.
The second reading agreement has further improved the situation, by introducing a public consultation period of 45 days before certain tests can be carried out, to verify whether the data is already available and consequently the tests are unnecessary.
An increase of 3% of animal testing in comparison to the current level of animal tests in the EU is only expected for the first eleven years after adoption of REACH. After these 11 years, the burden of the past concerning a lack of knowledge about 30.000 substances in use today should be adequately addressed and the numbers should then go down again steeply because only a few new substances per year will have to be tested.
