An analysis by the US-American Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
researchers says that the European Union's REACH (Registration, Evaluation,
Authorization and Restriction of Chemical) regulation may require 54 million
research animals and EUR 9.5 billion over the next 10 years, which represents 20
times the number of animals and 6 times the cost anticipated in previous
estimates.

The regulation is based on the law, which is intended as a comprehensive safety
evaluation for commercial chemicals used in consumer products that are traded
in Europe at amounts more than one ton per year.

Currently, the EU uses approximately 900,000 animals at a cost of EUR 600 million
per year to evaluate new chemicals, drugs, pesticides and food additives. A
commentary on the research is published in the August 26 edition of Nature. The
full analysis appears as an electronic prepublication of the September 2009
edition of the journal ALTEX, Alternatives to Animal Experimentation.

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AplusA-online.de - Source: Environmental protection