Copyright © 2010 Albuquerque Journal
By 2010 Rene Romo
Albuquerque Journal
Journal Southern Bureau
LAS CRUCES - The National Institutes of Health appears unmoved by appeals to spare roughly 200 chimpanzees housed at the Alamogordo Primate Facility on Holloman Air Force Base from further medical research.
Gov. Bill Richardson last month urged NIH director Francis Collins to "permanently retire" the chimps and convert the Alamogordo facility, managed by Charles River Laboratories under a 10-year federal contract due to expire May 2011, into a sanctuary.
Sen. Tom Udall has also asked NIH to reconsider its plan to move the chimps to the Southwest National Primate Research Center in San Antonio, Texas, a move designed to reduce costs and make some chimps available for research. Chimps cannot be subjected to research at the Alamogordo site.
Actor Gene Hackman, who has a home in New Mexico, added his voice this week to the pleas to NIH. In a letter to Collins, Hackman wrote: "These astonishingly intelligent animals have given their lives to research and should be retired."
In response to e-mailed questions, Cindy McConnell, communications director for NIH's National Center for Research Resources, wrote Monday that the majority of the Alamogordo-based chimps are expected to be moved to San Antonio next year.
Asked if NIH was reconsidering or delaying the chimp transfer in response to requests from animal rights activists and New Mexico officials, McConnell referred a reporter to a recently constructed page at the NIH website that discusses the planned move.
"They are not budging," said Lisa Jennings, executive director of Animal Protection of New Mexico, which is campaigning against the chimp transfer.
Under the expiring Charles River contract, housing chimpanzees at the Alamogordo facility costs taxpayers about $5 million per year. Those costs will shrink to about $3 million per year at the San Antonio, Texas, facility, according to NIH.
The $2 million to $3 million cost of renovating structures at the San Antonio research site to handle the influx of chimps will be recovered within a few years due to the savings, NIH says.
With the exception of a dedicated sanctuary, the Alamogordo Primate Facility is the only one of five NIH-funded sites that houses research chimpanzees but does not allow research on-site.
Once moved, the Alamogordo chimps will be available for infectious disease research, including hepatitis C studies, and drug safety and efficacy studies. A group called the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has criticized the use of apes in biomedical research, noting that the hepatitis C virus behaves differently in humans and chimps and that no human vaccine has been produced after four decades of research on chimps.
Posted with permission from the Albuquerque Publishing Company.
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