راهنمای جامع مراقبت و استفاده از حیوانات آزمایشگاهی

Background and Objective: Using animals in science have had major contributions in progression of human knowledge. However, this contribution has been always accompanied with varying degrees of pain and suffering for these sentient creatures, whom they are completely unable to defend their rights. In a humane and ethical point of view, we humans are responsible for protecting them. One of the most important means for protecting laboratory animals (LA) is to educate researchers according to the highest available ethical and scientific standards, thus developing the concept of “responsible researching” among the scientific community. The aim of the current study was to develop a comprehensive guide for the care and use of LA in the country. This guide is also aimed to provide a basis for the activity of the animals’ ethics committees in the country. Materials and Methods: The current qualitative study was based on a Health System Research platform and is formed according to the structured communication technique of experts’ panels based on the Delphi method. Primarily any available ethical codes of LA research in the country were collected and integrated. Then, they were compared with the ethical codes of the selected countries and any necessary modification or update of the primary codes were performed to prepare a draft of the comprehensive guide. Results: The draft was evaluated by a selected panel of experts in several rounds to achieve the maximum convergence between the experts. Results are presented narratively. Conclusion: The final version of the guide is presented along with this paper.