PETA Disrupts QMUL Senate Meeting to Call Out Cruel Sepsis Tests on Mice

PETA Disrupts QMUL Senate Meeting to Call Out Cruel Sepsis Tests on Mice

London – Earlier today, PETA supporters disrupted the Senate meeting at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), when activists with signs reading “QMUL: End Cruel Sepsis Experiments!” gave an unscheduled speech detailing the agony that mice experience in useless sepsis tests, which consistently fail to produce treatments for humans. Video footage of the disruption is available here.

“QMUL experimenters cut open mice’s colons, and allow faeces to leak into their bodies, leading to intense suffering. All animals are killed at the end of these pointless experiments that do nothing to help humans,” says PETA Senior Campaigns Manager Kate Werner. “PETA urges QMUL to get this cruelty out of its laboratories and switch to state-of-the-art research methods that leave animals alone and actually advance human health.”

More than 150 drugs have successfully treated sepsis in mice, yet none have been effective in treating humans. Despite the well-documented failure in using mice to model human sepsis, QMUL experimenters continue these experiments, noting that some mice experience severe sepsis, which can include difficulty breathing and tremors. Data from these experiments were published in papers that were later retracted after the journal was alerted to problems with some of the animal data. After investigation by the journal, data and conclusions from these papers were deemed “unreliable”.

Mice are intelligent, complex, and social individuals who form strong bonds with one another and with their human guardians. They experience a broad range of emotions, show affection, and love their families—traits that make their treatment in these experiments especially distressing.

PETA encourages everyone to urge Queen Mary to heed the scientific evidence and join other institutions – including the University of Kent – that have already committed to non-animal methods in sepsis research.

PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on” – points out that Every Animal Is Someone and offers free Empathy Kits. For more information, please visit PETA.org.uk or follow PETA on X, Facebook, or Instagram.

Contact:

Lucy Watson +44 (0) 20 7837 6327; [email protected]

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