A GLOBAL shortage of primates bred for medical research is hindering international efforts to find a cure for Aids and other diseases, the first worldwide audit of monkey and ape experiments says.

The demand for non- human primates for critical studies now vastly outstrips supply, according to the report by a team of Swedish scientists.

Research into HIV and Aids has particularly suffered because the primate species that provides the best animal model for the disease has become “virtually unavailable”, New Scientist magazine reports today. Indian-origin rhesus monkeys are crucial to such studies as they can develop Aids from SIV, the monkey equivalent of HIV.

As well as holding up the search for lifesaving treatments, the shortage of primates is also affecting animal welfare, Hans-Erik Carlsson of the University of Uppsala, who led the research, said.

Some scientists are reusing individual primates in multiple studies — usually illegal in Britain, which has the world’s toughest animal testing laws. “I have seen some protocols where they have been used as many as six or seven times,” Dr Carlsson said.

The audit, published in the American Journal of Primatology, examined scientific papers published in 2001 to determine how many non-human primates had been used in research worldwide.

They found nearly 3,000 relevant papers, suggesting that 4,411 studies were performed involving about 41,000 individual animals. This, however, is likely to be an underestimate, as many studies do not list how many animals they used, and not all animal experiments are published.

Most of the primates used, 65 per cent, were Old World monkeys such as rhesus macaques. New World monkeys such as marmosets account for 15 per cent, and apes slightly less than 9 per cent. Lesser apes, lower primates and unidentified species make up 11 per cent of the total. The most commonly used species was the vervet monkey, at 19 per cent, followed by the rhesus macaque, at 18 per cent.

Colin Blakemore, chief executive of the Medical Research Council, said that there were many areas of medicine, such as neuroscience and HIV/Aids research, in which non-human primates were the only useful model.

Mark Matfield, director of the Research Defence Society, said that it was ethically preferable to use the same monkey for two procedures rather than double the number of animals needed for experiments.

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