Stability of Free Available Chlorine Levels in Dilute Sodium Hypochlorite Solutions over a 6-Week Period.

Animal care and use programs commonly use chlorine and chlorine-based disinfectants to help prevent facility acquired infections in animals. The Department of Comparative Medicine (DCM) at Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) follows the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) disinfection guidelines for preparing and storing these disinfectants. DCM prepares bottles of dilute solutions of sodium hypochlorite (that is, commercial bleach) daily.

Effects on Mouse Food Consumption After Exposure to Bedding from Sick Mice or Healthy Mice.

Control mice housed in the same room as mice with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) demonstrate decreased food intake coincident with the cachexia experienced by the mice with PDAC. Mice are considered an empathetic species, and we hypothesized that the reduced food intake in normal mice was an "empathy state" that was mediated by olfactory cues. Naïve male and female C57BL/6 mice were exposed to soiled bedding from mice experiencing PDAC induced cachexia or from control mice in the PDAC study.

Effect of Continuous Trio Breeding Compared with Continuous Pair Breeding in 'Shoebox' Caging on Measures of Reproductive Performance in Estrogen Receptor Knockout Mice.

Some performance standards for continuous trio breeding in 'shoebox' cages for inbred stocks and outbred strains of mice challenge the minimum floor space recommendations in the 8th edition of the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals. In our study, we evaluated whether continuous trio breeding could be successfully applied to a breeding colony of genetically engineered mice housed in shoebox cages with a floor area of 67.6 in2.