Dive Summary:
- The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine prematurely announced that Tulane University stopped using pigs in its emergency and trauma procedure training program.
- A university spokesman confirms that the school will continue using the animals once renovations to its animal facility are completed within the next year.
- The organization has been lobbying for the school to abandon the use of pigs in the program since 2007, as robots programmed to mimic human conditions are a better learning tool and, according to Dr. John Pippin, only five of the 278 institutions offering this training in the U.S. and Canada still use live animals.
From the article:
... Pigs have been used because they are big enough for several people to work on an animal at the same time, said Dr. John Pippin, the organization's director of academic affairs said. Even though size makes pigs ideal for such training, skills learned on these animals have to be relearned on humans because of anatomical differences such as the placement of ribs, Pippin said. ...