>En Espanol The most commonly held perception regarding animal experimentation is that it is necessary for the development of vaccines, cures and treatments for human illness. Proponents ask the important question, what will happen to research on AIDS, heart disease, and cancer if animal experimentation is completely stopped? Will the progress in cures and treatments for these types of illnesses also come to a halt? There is a growing movement of health care professionals including doctors, scientists, and
Animals not only react differently than humans to different drugs, vaccines, and experiments, they also react differently from one another. Ignoring this difference has been and continues to be very costly to human health. The most famous example of the dangers of animal testing is the Thalidomide tragedy of the 1960s and 1970s. Thalidomide, which came out on the German market late in the 1950s, had previously been safety tested on thousands of animals. It was marketed as a wonderful sedative for pregnant or breastfeeding mothers and it supposedly caused no harm to either mother or child. Despite this "safety testing", at least 10,000 children whose mothers had taken Thalidomide were born throughout the world with severe deformities. Clioquinol is another example of a drug that was safety tested in animals and had a severely negative impact on humans. This drug, manufactured in Japan in the 1970s, was marketed as providing safe relief from diarrhea. Not only did Clioquinol not work in humans, it actually caused diarrhea. As a result of Clioquinol being administered to the public, some 30,000 cases of blindness and/or paralysis and thousands of deaths occurred.
Are these two examples just isolated cases? Even though pharmaceuticals are routinely tested on animals, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that 100,000 people every year are killed by prescription drugs and more than 2 million are hospitalized as a result of prescription drugs. The British Medical Journal recently reported that 4 out of every 10 patients who take a prescribed drug can expect to suffer severe or noticeable side effects, while numerous clinical observers agree that the incidence of iatrogenesis (medically induced disease) is now so great that approximately 1 in every 10 hospital beds is occupied by a patient who has been made ill by their doctor. What about all the important breakthroughs, as a result of animal research, that have aided human health? The animal research industry cites many examples of treatments or cures for illness that have been found using animals. They claim that if animal research is discontinued, it will be at the expense of human health and life. Industry groups, such as Americans for Medical Progress credit animal research with advances such as the development of the polio vaccine, anesthesia, and the discovery of insulin. But a close examination of medical history clearly disputes these claims.
Dr. Jonas Salk and Dr. Albert Sabin, are credited with the development of a vaccine to combat poliomyelitis (polio). Yet in the medical industry itself there remains a dispute as to the means by which the development of the polio vaccine occurred and whether or not the vaccine even played a major role in stopping the virus. Dr. John Enders, Dr. Thomas H. Weller, and Dr. Frederick C. Robbins won the Nobel Prize in 1954 for proving for the first time that it was possible to grow poliovirus in laboratory cultures of non-nervous-system human tissue. This team stopped just short of creating the polio vaccine that would be released to the public. Around the time Enders, Weller, and Robbins won the Nobel Prize, Sabin and Salk began using monkey kidney cells to produce their polio vaccines despite the existence of better alternatives. It was unknown at the time that viruses commonly found in monkey kidney cells are now known to cause cancer in humans. The claim that the polio vaccine was developed through the use of animal experimentation is misleading. Furthermore, as far as the benefits are concerned, there is ample evidence demonstrating the harmful effects the polio vaccine has had on human health. Deborah Blum, in her 1984 book, The Monkey Wars, wrote, "In the late 1980s, scientists tracking the life histories of 59,000 pregnant women all vaccinated with Salk polio vaccine found that their offspring had a thirteen times higher rate of brain tumors than those who did not receive the vaccine." (pg. 229) Many historians believe that the decline in cases in polio, like many epidemics of the past, must be attributed to factors such as improved hygiene and not solely vaccination. Surgical anesthesia was discovered in the mid nineteenth century when Crawford Williamson Long observed the effects of ether on humans during "ether parties", a popular form of entertainment involving ether inhalation. Long observed that while etherized, people appeared impervious to pain. He transformed this observation into a more practical use in surgery. The discovery of anesthesia, like many other medical discoveries, came from the critical observation of humans. At one time, due to the animal research based conclusions of Claude Bernard, diabetes was believed to be cause by liver damage. However, Thomas Crawley, in 1788 established the relationship between pancreatic damage and diabetes by performing autopsies on diabetic cadavers. Later on, Dr. M. Barron came to the conclusion that damage to the Islets of Langerhans causes diabetes in humans after studying the human pancreas. He concluded that insulin could be derived from an extract of the Islets of Langerhans. Then in 1920, Frederick Banting, using this knowledge, created the first extract that contained insulin.
Animal research is not aiding the fight against cancer. In fact, it is diverting resources from Animals are not good models for human cancer for 2 fundamental reasons:
Moneim A. Fadali, M.D., in his book, Animal Experimentation: A Harvest of Shame, reports: "Despite screening over half a million compounds as anti-cancer agents on laboratory animals between 1970-1985, only 80 compounds moved into clinical trials on humans. Of these, a mere 24 had any anti-cancer activity and only 12 appeared to have a 'substantial clinical role.' Actually, these so-called 'new' active agents were not so new: they are analogs of chemotherapeutic agents already known to work in humans." (pg.25) With billions of dollars, countless animals, and well over 30 years spent on the war on cancer, concrete results should have been seen if animal research was actually working. On the contrary, the incidence of cancer continues to rise. The progress that has been made in the study of AIDS has come from human clinical investigation and in vitro (cell and tissue culture) research. Animal models continue to be used even though they do not develop the human AIDS virus. The development of life saving protease inhibitors was delayed by misleading monkey data. Referring to efforts to develop an AIDS vaccine, leading AIDS researcher Dr. Mark Feinberg stated: "What good does it do you to test something in a monkey? You find five or six years from now that it works in the monkey, and then you test it in humans and you realize that humans behave totally differently from monkeys, so you've wasted five years". Clearly, if we are going to make medical progress, a new approach is needed. Human medicine can no longer be based on veterinary medicine. It is fraudulent and dangerous to apply data from one species to another. There are endless examples of the differences between humans and non-human animals.
The National Institutes of Health alone pours well over five billion dollars annually into superfluous |
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