When Sandy hit universities across North-east states, most of their medical labs were flooded. However, due to the staffs' presence of mind, majority of the animals were saved.

But, that is not the case with one of the nation's premiere educational institutions, New York University.

A week after Hurricane Sandy, critics are questioning the university's intention whether they did everything they could - and whether they followed government guidelines - to protect the research animals in the laboratories.

Thousands of animals, mostly mice housed in the basement of one NYU Langone Medical Center building on the East River in Manhattan, died during the storm. As a result, years of scientific work did by the researchers has gone down the drain.

According to NYU spokeswoman Jessica Guenzel, the biomedical facility lost 7,660 cages of mice and 22 cages of rats. Each cage houses between one and seven animals, she said.

Fran Sharples, director of the Board on Life Sciences at the congressionally chartered National Academy of Sciences (NAS) expressed her dismay toward the attitude of the medical labs that refuse to learn from the history.

'Anybody with half a brain knows you do a site-specific analysis' to understand the risk of disasters, she said, 'and it's really stupid to put your animals in the basement if you're in a flood zone.'

The incident was reminiscent of the 2001 incident, when tens of thousands of mice and scores of monkeys and dogs were lost when Hurricane Allison struck Houston; and in 2005, some 10,000 lab animals drowned when hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans.

In a statement, NYU has claimed that large numbers of animals remained unharmed during the storm.

Meanwhile, PETA-People for Ethical Treatment for Animals-has called for a probe into NYU's animal deaths.

"NYU knew for days the storm was coming but still left 10,000 terrified animals trapped inside their tiny cages in its secretive basement laboratories as waters rose," said Justin Goodman, PETA's associate director of the laboratory investigations department.

"This is probably a violation of federal animal welfare policy, and it also shows once again that experimenters view animals as disposable equipment who can carelessly be left to drown during a disaster."

Scientists whose research has been set back years have not publicly criticized NYU but are assessing what they lost. The careers of these researchers might take a heavy blow as a result of lost research.

SOURCE: REUTERS