Europe to BAN Animal testing by 2009! Read the NYtimes article!

Whoa! Check out this article from the New York Times it just made me really happy and hopeful! Europe is banning animal testing for cosmetics! Instead they will be testing on human tissue that they grow. wild stuff.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/20/business/worldbusiness/20cosmetic...

Here is an excerpt:

GRASSE, France — The delicate hybrids thriving in the balmy climes of
Provence, southern France’s traditional perfume region, include
sweet jasmine, May roses — and fresh layers of artificial human skin.

By 2009, only companies that shun the use of animals in testing will be
allowed to sell makeup in Europe.

Scientists here are working feverishly to develop new technologies to
test cosmetics before a European Union ban on animal testing begins in
March 2009.

These advanced materials — including reconstructed eye tissue and
tiny circles of skin developed from donor cells harvested from cosmetic
operations — are a vital part of the industry’s future as it faces
rapidly tightening European regulations, rules that apply to any company
wishing to sell in the 27-nation European Union.

The looming European ban is not only forcing multinational companies to
adopt new practices. It is also bringing together regulators in
Brussels with agencies from the world’s other large cosmetics markets —
the Food and Drug Administration in the United States and the Ministry
of Health in Japan — to harmonize regulation.

Even more surprising, the new standards are pushing longtime secretive
rivals to cooperate, grudgingly and sometimes with prodding from
regulators and politicians.

The European commissioner for science, Janez Potocnik, appeared this
month at a meeting for multinational companies and chided them for
slowing the search for alternatives by failing to share information.

The stakes are high: Europe is the world’s leading cosmetics market,
and it also exports more than $23.4 billion worth of cosmetics every
year. Cosmetics exported from the United States to Europe amount to
nearly $2 billion a year, about 7 percent of the European market. After the
United States, Japan is the second leading provider of cosmetics to
Europe .

“Without question these regulations are having an impact,” said Dr.
Alan Goldberg, director of the Center for Alternatives to Animal
Testing at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. “What company is going
to want to eliminate 450 million customers by not complying?”

The cosmetics giant L’Oréal has devoted more than $800 million in
the last 20 years to the development of alternatives to animal testing,
while its American rival, Procter & Gamble, maker of the Cover Girl
line, has spent almost $225 million.