RP10 Aquatic Ecotoxicology
Thursday, 17 November 2005: 8:00 AM - 6:30 PM in Exhibit Hall

(BEL-1117-115307) Acute Toxicity Testing of Fish and Animal Alternatives: Strategies to Implement the 3Rs.

Belanger, S¹, Rawlings, J¹, Carr, G.¹, Gimeno, S², ¹ The Procter & Gamble Company, Cincinnati, OH, USA² The Procter & Gamble Company, Brussels, Belgium

ABSTRACT- Animal alternatives have traditionally been the province of human safety assessments. The interpretation of the European Directive on the use of laboratory animals (Dir 86/809) and the draft chemical legislation (REACH) is moving the debate to the use of vertebrates in environmental risk assessment as well. Reducing the numbers of animals tested strategically occurs under the umbrella of the 3Rs-Replace, Reduce, and Refine. One goal of an implemented strategy would be to retain, at least, the current level of certainty in the environmental risk assessment process. A research program has been developed to assess the potential use of non-protected egg and embryonic life stages of fish and modify testing and statistical procedures to accommodate the use of fewer fish. This presentation provides an overview of the current avenues followed to implement the 3 Rs: 1) an assessment of alternative testing strategies such as the up and down procedure commonly used in small mammal acute toxicity testing (Bruce 1985; OECD, 2001) modified to accommodate fish and the step-down method proposed by Hutchinson et al. (2004) (reductive measures); 2) an assessment of the potential use of and rationale for fish early life stage (egg and eleutherembryo) acute tests (replacement measure) based on recent studies in our laboratories and reviews of related literature. In order to verify the applicability of these approaches, we are also presenting the outcome of 3) an assessment of the statistical basis for the numbers of fish typically used by aquatic toxicologists, and; 4) an evaluation of a greater role in risk assessments for acute fish toxicity limit tests under certain conditions (a reductive measure) Each of these approaches has value in achieving the above stated goal with an added benefit of potentially increasing speed of assessments due to reduced experimental complexity or shorter test timeframes.

Key words: animal alternative, acute toxicity, embryo, statistics