四六级考试

【单选题】Animal tests —More than a cosmetic (化妆品) change Every time you reach for an eye-drop or reapply a lip salve, you do be so confident that the chemicals they contain are safe to use.But the toxicology (毒物学) tests on which regulators rely to gather this information are largely based on wasteful and often poorly predictive animal experiments.Efforts inEurope are about to change this, and the man charged with bringing toxicology into the twenty-first century is a plain-talking German: Thomas Hartung.Although Hartung acknowledges the immense challenges ahead, he sees this as an opportunity for toxicology "to turn itself at last into a respectable science".Three years ago, when Hartung became director of theEuropeanCentre for the Validation ofAlternative MethodsECVAM) in Ispra, Italy.ECVAM was set up in 1993 to supportEuropean Union policy aimed at reducing the number of animals used in regulatory testing.The centre, which sits on the sleepy shores of Lake Maggiore in the ItalianAlps, originally had ten members of staff and faced an uphill struggle to cut back the millions of animal tests carried out inEurope every year. Then in 2003, two major policy changes were announced from above, increasing the pressure on the centre’’s labs.ECVAM found itself facing an unexpectedly short deadline for delivering a slew of animal-free methods for testing chemical toxicity.Rule changeThe first change was to theEuropean Union’’sCosmeticsDirective, which phases out over ten years the use of animals in cosmetics testing.
A、short while later, theEuropeanCommission proposed its controversial REACH legislation (Registration,Evaluation andAuthorization ofChemicals).Europe produces some 30,000 chemicals for which toxicity data have never been registere
D、REACH aims to make registration mandatory for both future and existing chemicals — even those that have been on the market for decades.If, as expected, the REACH directive is approved next year, it will come into effect in 2007.Animal-welfare groups fear that this will mean millions more animals will be used in tests to meet the regulatory requirements.And industry claims that the testing process could cost billions of euros.Almost overnight, industry’’s interest in cheaper, animal-free testing skyrockete
D、Last monthECVAM was put in charge of developing, with industry and regulatory agencies, the testing strategies for REACH. Now commanding 50 staff, Hartung is rising to the challenge. "The toxicity tests that have been used for decades are simply bad science", he explains. "We now have an opportunity to start with a clean slate and develop evidence-based tests that have true predictive value."Many of the animal tests used today were developed under crisis conditions. The notoriousDraize test, which assesses the irritation or damage caused by chemicals simply by putting them into the eyes of rabbits, is a prime example. It was developed by the US Food andDrugAdministration in 1944 after reports in the 1930s that some cosmetics were causing permanent eye injuries. One 38-year-old woman had gone blind after dyeing her lashes with Lash-Lure, a product that contained a derivative of coal tar.Then came the calamity of thalidomide (镇静剂), which was given to pregnant women in the late 1950s to control morning sickness, but which caused horrific birth defects.By this time, governments were highly sensitive to public concerns and called on their authorities to develop animal-based tests that would predict all conceivable toxic effects of drugs and chemicals. The principles behind most of those tests remain more or less unchanged today.Safety catch Each chemical that goes through the multiple tests required for registration can use up to 5,000 animals — or 12,000 if the chemical is a pesticide. The cost of doing this for the 30,000 unregistered chemicals so that they comply with REACH has been estimated at between 5 billion (US$6 billion)
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本题根据第一个黑标题下第三段而设，the toxicity test和Hartung是主要搜索线索。根据该线索可锁定该段第三句，根据该句可判断本题陈述正确。 document.getElementById("warp").style.display="none"; document.getElementById("content").style.display="block"; 查看试题解析出处>>