After all these years I’m rarely surprised by medical misogyny, but finding out that the research from the first ever tests on period products using blood instead of water were published LAST WEEK is one of those surprises.
Why kill animals? It's not like menstrual products don't work. just keep buying the stuff that works more than others if the little difference between the testing fluids and blood are really existent.
And it's not like the products would be better with blood testing. That's not how capitalism works. It needs to work good enough to be bought with the biggest profit margin possible. So using blood for testing just creates suffering for animals for no reason other than you can put "tested with animal blood" on the box. I wouldn't see that as a plus
I mean there's probably a fuck ton of additional work that would need to be done to test with real blood. Like just the paperwork and health and safety stuff would make it not worth while. Then there's sourcing it, the ethics, the potential of protest from anti-animal testing groups etc.
4 billion people, affected 5 days a month, for 40 years.
Nah, you're right - not worth the paperwork.
I mean, the ridiculousness of the disparity is highlighted in the article: we have a standardised measure for hot sauce, but not menstrual product absorbency.
My wife is pregnant. In her last month now. The discomfort and sacrifices woman go through...
I've been joking that if it were men being the ones going through pregnancy, we would've perfected incubating the fetus in a machine or something decades ago. Also, 12 months of paid paternity leave, at the minimum.
I'm not sure I'm joking...
They're billion dollar products, they absolutely could be made to test them if anyone cared enough to make them produce accurate labelling. If we can do it with food, we can do it with sanitary products. The NHS could do it, if it wanted to. It does plenty of independent trials to check up on how badly Pharma is lying to them this time.
Did anyone have access to the original publication and can tell me, if they explain how they determined it being the first study and what other liquids have been used before in studies? The Guardian article only says "Manufacturers have traditionally used saline or water", but that does not tell you much, as these are not scientists with independent studies and manufacturers usually do not publish their full internal testing methods.
I only have access to its abstract and curiously it does not mention it being the first published study with actual blood, so the authors themselves did not find it very noteworthy.
I can easily imagine, that a published, standardized, reproducible (model) menstrual fluid for such an analysis does not exist yet, but I am not that involved in medical publishing. If this is the case, that would be really infuriating. It might exist as some vendors sell artificial menstrual fluid.
No study exists comparing the capacity of currently available menstrual hygiene products using blood.
They don't have to explain how they know. Literature searches are standard, and done before doing research like this. Funders want to know if they're wasting their money on a question that has already been answered, and whether the proposed methods are appropriate given what has been done, and learnt, before.
That's not to say that all literature searches are perfect. You can check on PubPeer for any howls of anguish from unacknowledged researchers. But the only legal requirement for testing is tampons due to toxic shock syndrome and its relationship to absorbency. It's really unlikely that manufacturers are doing the tests without being forced to and, if they have done any, really unlikely they would fail to publish their results if they liked the results. If they are suppressing unwelcome results, the research might as well not exist.