FESSACAL: putting South America in the International context of Laboratory Animal Science

ROMERA SA; CARBONE C; DIAZ SL; GUARALDO AM

Foz de Iguaçu

Congreso; XIICongreso Internacional SBCAL; 2012

Sociedad Brasileña de Ciencia de Animales de Laboratorio

The Federation of South American Societies of Laboratory Animal Sciences, FESSACAL, was created in 1999 as an umbrella organization for coordinating actions aiming to improve and promote the ethical use of laboratory animals in this region. Since then, FESSACAL has supported several national and international scientific meetings, and helped ICLAS -Americas Regional Committee- to select local young candidates to award fellows for attending the AALAS annual meeting and the training award in the Massachusetts General  Hospital (MGH) for a period of three months. Enormous progress has been done during the last years in the field of laboratory animals, mostly in developed countries. The adverse economic context of Latin America makes it difficult to pursue with global actions, and in addition, these adverse effects are heterogeneous among the different countries. Nevertheless, the need of having a Federation representing the interests of our region is undeniable. Therefore, a group of professionals from different countries has decided to relaunch FESSACAL for strengthen the links between South American countries, and also with other International Federations. Several topics require urgent attention in order to improve the quality of science using animals, but we have targeted two main areas in order to concentrate efforts during a first phase: Continuous Education, and Regulations and Accreditation. For instance, the European Directive (2010/63/UE) requires professionals to be "adequately educated, competent and continuously trained". FELASA has published some Guidelines on the subject establishing that Continuous Education should be available and that communication between countries should be encouraged by the organization of joint courses. These recommendations should, in principle, be able to be fully applied in our region, but a major problem is the lack of availability of suitable courses, workshops, seminars or even worse, their poor spreading. The other topic for our Workshop, concerning Regulations and Accredtation, is a second key factor in developing a framework for the appropriate use of laboratory animals. The use of animals in science must be done in a regulated context in order to guarantee both good science and animal well-being. During the last years, Laws regulating the use of animals in research have been promulgated in some Latin American countries and others plan to introduce similar regulations in the near future. Although introduction of such laws is a major achievement for the region, it is somewhat difficult to implement what it is written in Laws. Our objective is to find tools to help in this process. This session is therefore focused on the necessity of building a bridge between all the Latin American countries with similar difficulties to maximize progress in this area.Individual and national lab animal Associations representatives of South American countries have been consulted in the last two months to collect information concerning the availability of courses as well as the regulation currently in force in each country. A summary of all these data will be presented in the Workshop, together with a picture of the current constitution of FESSACAL. We expect to do significant progress in both topics, with the aim of gathering highly motivated professionals to work on these two areas pointing to the organization of a first FESSACAL meeting by the end of the year.