Taking aim at one of the last bastions of live-animal training for medical students, a physicians' group that champions animal rights has called upon the Johns Hopkins University to stop using live pigs to teach operating room techniques.
Calling the practice inhumane and unnecessary, the Washington-based Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine notes that Hopkins is one of just two top-tier medical schools still convening live-animal labs.
"The ethical argument is that you should not use sentient creatures to our purposes unnecessarily," said Dr. John J. Pippin, a Dallas cardiologist affiliated with the group. "The reasons to use live animals, whatever they were, are no longer valid."
With Case Western Reserve University's decision to hold its last live-pig labs this semester, Hopkins will be the lone holdout among medical schools in the top 20 in the annual U.S. News & World Report ranking.
Overall, just 10 of the nation's 126 M.D.-granting medical schools use live animals during surgical rotations, according to the animal rights group. A larger number of teaching hospitals use animals to train postgraduate surgical residents, and animals are widely used to test new medical devices and surgical techniques.
For its part, Hopkins has no plans to end the use of live pigs, despite a flood of e-mails from animal rights activists and an editorial in The Johns Hopkins News-Letter, the undergraduate newspaper.
"I can't change their feelings, but we'd want them to understand that we really do think it's important in surgical training," said Dr. Julie Freischlag, director of surgery at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
Like most of their peers nationwide, Hopkins students practice basic surgical skills on computerized simulators, mannequins and dead animal tissue. Although they watch surgeons work on human patients and may pass instruments or snip sutures, they're not allowed to operate on people.
Freischlag said pigs give students the feel of live tissue - and help students decide whether they really have the interest or dexterity to become surgeons.
"Simulators have no feedback as to texture and touch," Freischlag said. "That's where it's so important to use animals, to feel all the right tensions and strengths."
Freischlag argued that most schools have abandoned pigs because of their high cost. She said that the Hopkins live-animal program had "dwindled" by the time she came to Hopkins five years ago but that she reinvigorated it at a cost of $75,000 per year because students demanded it.
