In the latest perversion of science that PETA has uncovered at the University of Massachusetts Chan School of Medicine (UMass Chan), an experimenter was kicked off her own experiments because she failed to rein in a staff member whose cavalier and sloppy euthanasia techniques repeatedly violated regulations and may have condemned mice to agonizing deaths in a freezer.
Meet Milena Bogunovic, who has siphoned nearly $5 million in federal funding over the past decade by jamming tubes down the throats of mice, inducing painful intestinal diseases, cutting them open, manipulating their insides, and ultimately killing them in pointless experiments. The National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases has given her more than $4 million, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases contributed nearly another $1 million.
Bogunovic shoves tubes down mice in procedures like the one depicted here in a useless attempt to create models of human intestinal diseases.
Bogunovic joins her inglorious colleagues Matt Gounis, Heather Gray-Edwards, and Raffi Aroian on the roster of UMass Chan’s Team Terrible, whose cruelty and incompetence PETA has recently detailed.
Botched Killing
Bogunovic’s staff member was caught improperly euthanizing mice six times in eight months. Twice in one month, the staff member put mice in a freezer but skipped a required secondary euthanasia method, raising the possibility that some were still alive when they were frozen.
The staff member was also caught three times cramming too many mice into a euthanasia chamber, violating requirements designed to minimize fear, distress, and suffering.
But months later, the staff member was caught again doing the same thing. Veterinarians intervened, and the staff member was permanently banned from working with animals.
Then, in an almost unheard-of rebuke, the school’s animal care committee booted Bogunovic from her own experiments. Bogunovic had to prove her competence before the school allowed her to return a year later.
Inflicting Painful Intestinal Disease
Bogunovic makes her living by tormenting mice in painful experiments supposedly aimed at understanding inflammatory bowel disease, intestinal immunity, and gastrointestinal inflammation.
She gives some mice a chemical that damages the intestinal lining, leading to colitis. Mice suffer inflammation, diarrhea, weight loss, and gastrointestinal injury. Others receive antibiotics before being infected with a form of Salmonella that triggers severe intestinal inflammation, causing the gut to become so damaged that bacteria can leak into the bloodstream. Left untreated, the condition is fatal.
Some experiments examine how inducing intestinal inflammation affects the part of the nervous system that helps regulate digestion. To do this, Bogunovic repeatedly jams tubes down the throats of mice, takes blood and tissue samples, cuts open their bellies, inserts tubes to collect fluid, manipulates their immune systems with antibodies and transferred immune cells, and then kills them.
Torment, Not Science
Bogunovic’s experiments are pointless. Her experiments create artificial forms of intestinal disease in mice that fail to capture the complexity of human inflammatory bowel diseases and have repeatedly proven unreliable for predicting human responses to treatment.
Get Involved
Please add your voice to ours. TAKE ACTION today and urge UMass Chan to get out of the cruel and pointless animal tormenting business altogether and switch to human-relevant, non-animal research methods.
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