Every year since 1986, IDA has hosted World Week For Animals In Laboratories (WWAIL), a campaign that encourages people to take action on behalf of animals used in experiments and testing. This year, WWAIL will be held from April 20-26, so there is still time to plan an event that will educate the public about vivisection's inherent cruelties, scientific failures, and moral bankruptcy. Visit wwail.org to learn how.

Many animal experiments are funded by the public through our taxes, yet there is very little accountability for how our money is spent or what is done to animals. One example that IDA is focusing on now is the lethal nicotine experiments being performed on mother and baby monkeys by Dr. Elliot Spindel at Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU).

We’ve known for decades that smoking causes cancer and a host of other serious, life-threatening diseases. We also know that women who smoke during pregnancy are likely to harm their babies. So it seems insane that, in the year 2008, millions of tax dollars are being wasted to help Big Tobacco find a way for women to continue smoking during pregnancy without damaging their unborn children.

Spindel studies this "problem" by implanting nicotine pumps into the backs of pregnant monkeys, and slicing their fetuses out of their wombs at various developmental stages to dissect their lungs. In other cases, mothers are allowed to give birth, but their babies are torn away by researchers soon afterward, causing the mothers severe grief and traumatizing the newborn infants. IDA's Northwest Coordinator Matt Rossell saw these horrors with his own eyes, having spent two years as an undercover animal care provider at OHSU, and described what he experienced in his journal:

"Among the most horrifying things I witnessed were the times when baby monkeys were stolen away from their mothers. This was a chaotic, ugly, heart-wrenching scene. A worker wearing thick leather gloves would reach into the cage where the baby clung to her mother's breast, and snatch the baby by one shoulder and arm and rip her from her mother who was screaming and desperately fighting to keep her baby safe. Once the baby was removed, the entire room of monkeys would erupt into total pandemonium—screaming, thrashing and crashing into the sides of their cages—some reaching out through the bars in vain to get their babies back."

American taxpayers have funded this barbaric research with $7.6 million in grant money given to Spindel by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) since 1992, with payment scheduled to continue through 2012. While this is one of the more egregious examples of animal abuse and scientific fraud funded by taxpayers, it is certainly not the only one. WWAIL provides an opportunity for activists to collectively protest and expose the animal experiments being conducted at academic institutions in their communities.

Visit wwail.org to check the scheduled WWAIL events, register your own event, and get assistance planning a WWAIL event from an IDA coordinator.