In the European Union, animal welfare has a high priority. This also has implications for the use of animals in a scientific context. The EU has therefore committed itself to the 3Rs principle - through "Reduction, Refinement and Replacement" the number of animal experiments and laboratory animals should be reduced and the conditions for the remaining laboratory animals improved. In an article published in the scientific journal "Current Biology", numerous scientists discuss why a complete elimination of animal testing is not yet possible in the foreseeable future and how the current COVID-19 pandemic proves this.
The full article "How the COVID-19 pandemic highlights the necessity of animal research" in Current Biology can be found here.
Fig. 1: Principle of the 3 Rs to reduce the number of laboratory animals and optimize the conditions for animals in scientific studies.
