The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is working on finding another tool to help reduce the number of animals used in terrifying pesticide tests.
It was just announced that the launch of a pilot program would ask pesticide companies to submit any data from past studies on animal-toxicity along with calculations from a certain equation that predicts a certain product’s overall toxicity.
However, it’s the equation that is the cool part, since it adds together each of the product’s ingredients’ toxicities in pesticide formulations to obtain a total hazard rating for the product.
At the present moment, the EPA requires that any pesticide formulations be tested on innocent animals, despite the fact that toxicities for all of the individual ingredients are most likely known.
However, the EPA says they will use submissions under the pilot program to analyze how well the equation works as an alternative to testing on animals.
The EPA receives 200 to 300 applications for new pesticide formulas every year, so this equation could be a valid alternative and could possibly save the lives of at least 5,000 animals a year.
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