'It's heartbreaking.' Labs are euthanizing thousands of mice in response to coronavirus pandemic

[douglas9]

Faced with her lab’s imminent closure, Sunny Shin had already begun to fear she would have to euthanize large numbers of the mice she works on. Then, last Tuesday, the email came from her school’s vice provost of research. “In response to the public health crisis caused by COVID-19,” it read, “mouse/rodent users should cull their colonies as much as possible.”

Shin, a microbial immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, had to deliver the bad news to her lab manager: Euthanize 200 mice—more than three-quarters of their research animals—as quickly as possible. Many of the rodents had come from Europe and Asia, and it had taken years to obtain them and breed them for the genotypes the lab needs to study how the immune system responds to bacterial invaders. “It was heartbreaking,” Shin says, “scientifically and emotionally.”

Shin’s lab isn’t alone. Last week, confronting the possibility of extreme animal care shortages and disruptions to research, universities across the country asked labs to think hard about the mice they actually need, to freeze the embryos of valuable or unique strains, and—in many cases—to cull the rest.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/it-s-heartbreaking-labs-are-euthanizing-thousands-mice-response-coronavirus-pandemic

[Jirel]

1. I don't get it.

200 mice? That’s a nothingburger to care for. I have a decades-long volunteer gig in wildlife rehabilitation. We farm rats and sometimes mice for predator food. Keeping up the colony takes so little work. You change a few bins daily, a few minutes each. You do waters, and you top up food. Seconds per bin. How are 200 mice a huge burden for even minimal animal care staff?

[defacto7]

2. It doesn't make sense to me either.

It's hardly an expense. Postponing tests,ok. But killing them becase of a few bucks worth of food? There are plenty of people who would help with that. On the less sympathetic side, why trash years of work and study probably worth hundreds of thousands of dollars over a couple hundred bucks worth of feed? I smell something fishy.

[cstanleytech]

4. Best guess? Might be an issue of them having to keep the mice under specific controlled conditions

to avoid contamination which could render any results invalid and if they are concerned over not having the people, materials and or other resources to maintain those controlled conditions.

[Lars39]

3. Sounds like they are having to totally shut the buildings down

and lock people out.