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27 Nov 2008
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Debatewise debate DEBATE: ANIMAL TESTING FOR MEDICAL RESEARCH

The use of live animals in controlled laboratory tests is common place the world over. This debate aims to lay out the argument both for and against. Before you cast your vote, I ask you to put aside your initial persuasion, and weigh up the relative merits as outlined below.





Debatewise debateANIMAL TESTING FOR MEDICAL RESEARCH


Animal research has played a vital role in a great many of the major medical advances of the last century


According to the US-based Foundation for Biomedical Research, ‘animal research has played a vital role in virtually every major medical advance of the last century – for both human and veterinary health. From antibiotics to blood transfusions, from dialysis to organ transplantation, from vaccinations to chemotherapy, bypass surgery and joint replacement, practically every present-day protocol for the prevention, treatment, cure and control of disease, pain and suffering is based on knowledge attained through research with lab animals.’
Without such testing, most, if not all of these procedures that save thousands of lives and elevate the pain of millions of people would simply not be possible.
Just a few of the many named examples of the advances made possible through animal testing include [source: Foundation of Biomedical Research]:
Smallpox eradication (testing with cows)
Polio eradication in the developed world (mouse & monkey)
Availability of insulin (fish & dog)
Tetanus vaccines (horse)
Rubella vaccines (monkey)
AIDS treatment (monkey)

Interesting list of totally unsupported statements! I think even a brief perusal of the medical literature will highlight the ludicruous falsity of these claims. Animal experiments have retarded medical progress due to the conflicting results, caused by species-variation, they provide.
Here are some examples:
BLOOD TRANSFUSION: BLOOD GROUPS AND TYPING
"According to the Report of the Royal Commission on Vivisection (1912): The first human blood-transfusion was made by Andre Libavius in 1594 when, for a large reward, the blood of a young man was passed into the veins of an older man. Modern technique depends upon a careful matching of blood-types, and no animal experiments have, or could have helped in this essential particular."
(Hans Ruesch, One Thousand Doctors (and many more) Against Vivisection, page 131.)
The following information is taken from Cardiac Arrest by Emil Levin, M.D. and Diane Danielson.
"The French physician, Jean Denis, transfused lambs’ blood into numerous patients who all died. Not recognizing the basic differences between animals and humans, Denis did not realize why his technique failed. Yet, because of the failure of this animal experiment, no further attempts were made for more than a century."
(K. Walker, The Story of Medicine, Hutchinson, 1954. R. McGrew, Encyclopedia of Medical History, MacMillan Press, 1985. A. Gastiglioni, A History of Medicine, (1947 edition translated by E.B. Krumbhaer) Ryerson Press, 1941.)
The identification of the various blood groups by Karl Landsteiner, an Australian emigrant who was awarded a Nobel Prize for his achievement, which permitted safe blood transfusions, was a result of direct observation of humans.
(J.E. Schmidt, Medical Discoveries Who and When, Charles C. Thomas, 1959. P. Levine and R.E. Stetson, FAMA, Vol. 113, 1939, pages 126-127.)
Antibiotics
"Clinical Medical Discoveries by Dr M. Beddow Bayly, M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P. outlines a brief history of the discovery and application, by human observations, of antibiotic penicillin until the advent of Prof. A. Fleming and Sir Howard Florey, who carried out all their initial experiments in vitro. More recently Dr Robert Sharpe, basing his article on Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics by T. Koppanyi and M.A. Avery, Vol. 7, 1966, pages 250-270, agreed with a report made by Hans Ruesch in Naked Empress (or the Great Medical Fraud) that Fleming, being worried that penicillin might be de-activated by blood, injected a sample into rabbits, which died. Discouraged he abandoned penicillin until Oxford scientists Florey and Chain resurrected it for further tests. Being out of stock of the usual guinea-pigs on the day of the trials they used mice which it cured and penicillin was acclaimed. Later trials with guinea-pigs proved fatal, even with tiny amounts. Another coincidence occurred when Fleming was reluctant to inject penicillin into the spine of a critically-ill patient and Florey tried it on cats. As the patient was near death with insufficient time to observe the cats Fleming took a gamble and administered the penicillin. The patient lived and the cats died. Thus humans received penicillin despite the erroneous and inconclusive trials with animals which almost resulted in its rejection and abandonment.
Despite its apparent success, evidence shows that the discovery of antibiotics might have been a devil in disguise. In Slaughter of the Innocent Hans Ruesch reveals reports from many doctors and medical institutions warning that antibiotics weaken the organisms while strengthening the various strains of bacteria to such an extent that some of them eventually defy every type of antibiotic.
Ruesch points out that by the end of the 1940s antibiotics were so overprescribed that the result was the production of stronger and stronger bacteria, and weaker and weaker human beings. By the 1950s various hospitals registered outbreaks of epidemics that no antibiotic was able to cure. Brian Inglis reported that in the U.S. there were "over a hundred such epidemics in a single year, of which one killed 22 patients in a Texas hospital". When the medical authorities argued that the use of antibiotics was justified in spite of the recognised damage, John Lear, former science editor of the Saturday Review wrote in a "miracle drugs" article about a study made by Charles Henry Kempe, University of Chicago medical researcher, as follows:
"The record shows that prophylactic antibiotics do more harm than good. Dr Kempe’s study cited in this connection the result of a 250 ‘clean’ operation. Of the 154 not subjected to prophylactic antibiotics only 7.8% developed bacterial aftermath. The remaining 96 patients all received prophylactic antibiotics, of which 37.5% were subjected to bacterial complications." "
Smallpox
"Although the notion of inoculation against smallpox had been around for over 1000 years, it was Edward Jenner who revived the idea in the late 18th century. Smallpox inoculation was allowed until a fierce outbreak of the disease occurred in 1838, when the practice was banned under threat of imprisonment.
Smallpox then declined steadily until, in 1867, vaccination was enforced by law, on all children. Then began the largest epidemic ever in Britain, with a peak of 42,000 deaths per year.
Leicester and Dewsbury rejected the serum and relied on effective measures, hygiene and sanitation. Consequently these towns had the lowest death rate in the country.
Walter R. Hadwen, a vegetarian doctor became First Prizeman in Physiology, Operative Surgery, Pathology, Forensic Medicine and in 1891 won the Clark Scholarship for "distinguished medical student of the year". He became famous nationwide when he eradicated an epidemic of smallpox in Gloucester by ruling out all vaccination and introducing strict measures of hygiene and isolation of the infected. In 1910 he accepted the Presidency of the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, a position he retained until his death."
Polio
http://www.health.org.nz/polio.html
Ten years earlier, in 1973, Prof. Clausen, Director of the Institute of Preventative Medicine at the University of Odense, Denmark, warned the medical establishment:
"Millions of people have been inoculated with anti-polio vaccine contaminated with tumoral SV40 virus." (Present in the green monkey cells ground to produce the vaccine.) "It is possible that it will take 20 or more years before the eventual harmful effects of the vaccine will manifest itself."
"In 1941, Dr. Albert Sabin studied human autopsies to finally disprove the nasal theory. He found the virus confined to the gastrointestinal tract, as had been documented nearly 30 years earlier.
Sabin later denounced the monkey model blunder:
’... prevention was long delayed by the erroneous conception of the nature of the human disease based on misleading experimental models of the disease in monkeys.’"
Smallpox
"Although the notion of inoculation against smallpox had been around for over 1000 years, it was Edward Jenner who revived the idea in the late 18th century. Smallpox inoculation was allowed until a fierce outbreak of the disease occurred in 1838, when the practice was banned under threat of imprisonment.
Smallpox then declined steadily until, in 1867, vaccination was enforced by law, on all children. Then began the largest epidemic ever in Britain, with a peak of 42,000 deaths per year.
Leicester and Dewsbury rejected the serum and relied on effective measures, hygiene and sanitation. Consequently these towns had the lowest death rate in the country.
Walter R. Hadwen, a vegetarian doctor became First Prizeman in Physiology, Operative Surgery, Pathology, Forensic Medicine and in 1891 won the Clark Scholarship for "distinguished medical student of the year". He became famous nationwide when he eradicated an epidemic of smallpox in Gloucester by ruling out all vaccination and introducing strict measures of hygiene and isolation of the infected. In 1910 he accepted the Presidency of the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, a position he retained until his death."
Rubella
Australian Dr Glen Dettman reports that the failure rate of the vaccine alone would be grounds for concern, but the evidence of damage done by the vaccine is much more worrying as "one third of individuals suffering from rheumatoid arthritis have live rubella viruses in their joints".
An article in J.I.D., Vol. 151, 1985, pages 330-336 reads:
"If there has been an inadequate immune response after vaccination, as often happens, there is a pronounced danger that the person will become a carrier of rubella as well as developing arthritis and an enlarged thyroid."
Any reasonably diligent investigator will find it easy to turn up evidence opposing ARSL’s claims. All one requires is time and a little patience. All vaccines and modern drugs are developed on laboratory animals… therefore on fraud. Small wonder that the end result is heavy with catastrophe. The following comments are from a battery of prestigious sources, all impeccably qualified to make them:
"As the Department of Health and Social Security prepares its campaign on rubella vaccination, the Spastics Society maintains that the nine-year-old rubella prevention programming has not yet made any great impact on the number of women whose babies may be affected by maternal rubella in early pregnancy, has remained essentially unaltered", the Society’s report says.
"There is no evidence that fewer congenital rubella babies are being born now than ten years ago, and there are still large numbers of women who are vulnerable to rubella. The programme has failed and the future does not look hopeful."
(The Lancet, May 5 1979.)
"Trials on rubella vaccine in the USA have shown a failure rate of 93%."
(Here’s Health, April 1980.)
"An 80% failure rate amongst Army recruits was noted by Dr Beverley Allan of the Austin Hospital, Melbourne."
(Australian Nurse’s Journal, May 1987.)
"Thirty-two women who had either been vaccinated against rubella, or who had been screened and found immune, when they became pregnant all contracted rubella. Nineteen chose to have their babies, only one child had a birth defect. The other 13, brain-washed by the rubella vaccine cartel, had abortions."
(British Medical Journal, November 16 1987.)
"The Nobel Laureate, Dr John Enders, has suggested that the rubella vaccine makes it more likely that young girls will contract the disease when they grow up."
(Patrick Rattigan, Blood Poison (Vaccination Explained), June 1990.)
HEART TRANSPLANT
Covered in Chapter 14 Kidney Disease, Organ Transplants and Dialysis. Dr M.H. Pappworth, eminent London physician and internationally known teacher of clinical medicine, wrote:
"The public should know that transplant surgery never cures the original disease and never makes the recipient a healthy person… All transplant surgery is a confession of failure, of unsuccessful early diagnosis and treatment."
(Hans Ruesch, One Thousand Doctors (and many more) Against Vivisection, page 98.)
Experiments on dogs to develop transplant techniques were disastrous. Hundreds of dogs were used yet the first human patients died because of complications which arose when the technique was applied to the first human patients.
(Dr Albert Iben, Stanford University cardiac surgeon reported in the Erie Daily Times, May 23 1968.)
By 1980, 65% of patients survived more than a year as a result of increased skill gained through clinical experience.
(Lancet, March 29 1980, pages 687-688.)
MONITORING EEG
The electroencephalograph is not a result of animal experimentation.
(M. Beddow Bayly, Clinical Medical Discoveries, NAVS, 1961.)
FLOATING CARDIAC CATHETER
Dr Forssman used his own forearm to develop cardiac catheterization and his technique was completed through clinical trials with human patients.
(M. Beddow Bayly, Clinical Medical Discoveries, NAVS, 1961.)
THE CAGED BALL VALVE
Doctors Starr and Edward almost discarded the caged ball valve as it killed all their experimental dogs. It was however successful on human beings.
(A. Starr, "Mitral Replacement: Clinical Experience with a Ball-Valve Prosthesis", Annals of Surgery, 154(4):740, 1961.)
VENTILATION OF OPEN THORAX
Doctors Ivan Magill and E.S. Rowbotham, working with World War I casualties at Sir Harold Gillie’s plastic surgery hospital in Sidcup, Great Britain developed the technique of delivering anaesthetic gas through a single endotracheal tube under positive pressure controlled by the patient’s breathing. They performed no animal experiments.
(R.G. Richardson, The Surgeon’s Heart: A History of Cardiac Surgery, William Heinemann Medical Books Ltd, page 101.)
DEFIBRILLATION
Fibrillation of the ventricles is life-threatening. Reverend John Wesley in the 18th Century through clinical observations successfully used electrotherapy to stop fibrillation in human patients. More than a century later in 1899 Presost and Batteli "re-proved" what Wesley had developed, by using electric shock to reverse ventricular fibrillation in dogs. William B. Kouwenhoven of Johns Hopkins University is sometimes credited by pro-vivisectionists for developing a closed-chest defibrillator for dogs and then for human use in 1957. However clinician Dr P. Zoll had developed closed-chest resuscitation on patients in 1956. Once again Kouwenhoven repeated what Zoll had discovered through human observations and falsely credited animal research for the advance.
(L. Wertenbaker, To Mend the Heart, the Viking Press, 1980, page 178.); (J.H. Comroe, Exploring the Heart: Discoveries in Heart Disease and High Blood Pressure, W.W. Norton and Company, 1983, page 159.); (L.E. Meltzer, Textbook of Coronary Care, The Charles Press Publishers Inc., A Prentice Hall Company, 1980, page 4.)
ELECTIVE CARDIAC ARREST
For "restarting" the heart once again animal experiments gave misleading results. Though a technique was shown "effective" in animals, it was discarded for use in humans because of "many problems, consisting of pain, burns and inability to keep up continuous stimulation for a prolonged period".
(W. Lillihei, "The Treatment of Complete Heart Block by the Combined Use of a Myocardial Electrode and an Artificial Pacemaker", Surgical Forum, 43rd Clinical Congress, Vol. VII, American College of Surgeons, Chicago, 1957.)
MYOCARDIAL PRESERVATION TECHNIQUES
Scientists at the Middlesex Hospital and Medical School recently isolated individual heart cells from human heart muscle. These cells are useful in research into heart disease and in the preservation of heart (myocardial) tissue for cardiac surgery, with the advantage that results are directly applicable to patients because as the researchers stated: "... it is difficult and often misleading to extrapolate experimental results in animal tissues to man."
(T. Powell, et al, BMF, October 17 1981, pages 1013-1014.)
THE PACEMAKER
Each of the techniques made to contract or stimulate the ventricles in attempts to "pace" the human heart was tested on dogs and shown "effective", even heralded as a success, however they were "quickly discarded in patients because of the many problems, consisting of pain, burns and inability to keep up continuous stimulation for the prolonged period". Dr C. Walton Lillihei pioneer of the pacemaker, seeing his method which was developed on dogs fail to cross the species, devised, through observing his patients, a method of "stitching electrodes directly on to the heart, leading them through the chest and running a pulsed current through them".
"The development of artificial pacemakers for complete heart block grew out of direct studies of human patients suffering from ventricular septal defect."
(W. Lillihei, "The Treatment of Complete Heart Block by the Combined Use of a Myocardial Electrode and an Artificial Pacemaker", Surgical Forum, 43rd Clinical Congress, Vol. VIII, American College of Surgeons, Chicago, 1957, page 360.)
Also refer L. Wertenbaker, To Mend the Heart, The Viking Press, 1980, page 181; and R.G. Richardson, The Surgeon’s Heart: A History of Cardiac Surgery, William Heinemann Medical Books Ltd, page 101.
OPEN-HEART SURGERY
The heart-lung machine was the most critical development in open-heart surgery for it takes over the function of the patient’s heart and lungs during open heart operations. John H. Gibbon of Philadelphia, U.S.A. who developed a heart-lung machine on dogs abandoned his project when two patients died, admitting that it was unsafe for human beings. J.W. Kirklin of the Mayo Clinic, without the use of animals and using careful clinical trials made a heart-lung machine which was successful on human beings.
(H. McLeave, The Risk Takers, Holt, Rinehard & Winston, 1962, page 70.)
"Results from animal experiments in the 1960s suggested that there might be important advances in transplantation and there-by prompted a large amount of further research into heart and kidney transplants in rats. But tissue differences between humans and rats proved that animal experiments were once again misleading. The encouraging results had raised hopes that a major advance in clinical immunosuppression for transplantation was in the offing, but these hopes have now faded and nothing of the great mass of work has been translated into clinical practice."
(John Fabre of Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Surgery, Transplantation, Vol. 34, 1982, pages 223-234.)
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The foundation for biomedical research!? Are you having a laugh? They are a lobby group for the vivisection industry. They are hardly going to say otherwise. It was known 200 years ago how to innoculate against smallpox. And even further back in history they knew about it in India. It was known that microbes caused disease. It became known – hundreds of years ago – that weakened strains of microbes could protect against disease. Who tried to find things without vivisection? No one, I’ll bet. Those people just reached for the nearest mouse of dog, just as they had been trained to do. We have to take their word for it that there was no other way. I wouldn’t take their word if it was gift wrapped.
The fact is that the vivisection/pharmaceutical world order have been caught again and again cheating, lying, corrupting and passing money under the table. Nothing they say can be relied upon as the truth. They have hidden data, claimed that researchers wrote studies when they didn’t, and hidden whole trials because the data was too hot to try to massage. They have corrrupted regulators, governments and scientists. They have deliberately put human lives in danger. Deliberately and willingly.


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Debatewise debateANIMAL TESTING FOR MEDICAL RESEARCH


There are no satisfactory alternatives to animal research


Alternatives to animal testing do exist and scientists already use them. In fact, they are mandated to do so by law wherever possible. Such alternatives exist in the form of computer modeling and in vitro testing (testing on a cell culture).
However, living organisms are incredibly complex systems. The only possible way to build a model that accurately represents them is through animal research. It is currently not possible to build a complete human model as it is simply too sophisticated for current computers. For example, no computer model could predict the effect of a electrode insertion therapy for Parkinson’s disease on the human brain, which is capable of performing 100’000’000’000’000’000 operations per second. Yet this can be done using an animal model.
Computer models are currently at the stage of predicting molecular interactions, however they are still a great way to go before they could accurately model even the most basic of organisms, let alone the incredibly complex human body.
Furthermore, it would be in the pharmaceutical companies’ interests to do use alternatives wherever possible – imagine the cost to housing, maintaining and testing on animals.

Animals do not represent the human body sufficiently and quite often what happens in an animals body would not happen in a humnas when i comes to drug testing and vice versa. there is a simple solution to getting test subject in a human form and that is to use convicted criminals, people who have commited the most heanus of crimes people who are on death row and are people who are just sitting in jail waiting to die because they will never be released. Let them give something back to society by being human guinneapigs this way medication and medical research would have a true basis for their findings rather than speculated one. It is definatly the way to the future. Also there would not be a problem with housing, maintaining and testing because they are allready being housed in hms prisons and the tax payer is allready paying for them to be fed, clothed and they have plenty of facilities that the general public don’t have access to let them be our human guinneapigs and earn their keep in prison after all like i said before they need to give something back to society and it may even prove to be a deterant to crime.
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There are many satisfactory methods that don’t rely on torture. But not enough money is spent on them and there is no co-ordinated employment of what already exists. Non-humans are so different to humans – and to other non-humans – that no data from them can be relied on to predict what will happen to humans. It is only once the data have been applied to humans – thousands of them – that it can be known if the data is useful. Usually, it isn’t despite it seeming to be so in those other species.
In the UK there are people on the 3Rs advisory board who have their fingers in the animal abuse industry. They profit from vivisection and are hardly likely to advocate an end to vivisection.
It is not in drug companies’ best interests to end vivisection. They rely on it to protect themselves from lawsuits because the law believes them when they say that they need to test for safety, and that using non-humans is the best way. The cost of compensation claims would far outweigh any housing and feeding costs for the rats and monkeys. The development of non-vivisection methods has many barriers to it and the company that overcomes those barriers will be using time and money that could be used to make drugs under the present system. There would be no guarantee that any method they tried to develop would be successful, and all the time their rivals would be quietly going about their grisly business of developing drugs and making profits.
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There are no ‘satisfactory alternatives’ to the industries that use animal experiments, particularly Big Pharma, because animal experiments give them WHATEVER RESULT they desire, by producing so many different outcomes, dependant upon the species, method of ingestion, and many, many other factors. This enables them to find the result they need to pass their products off as ‘safe’ or a rival’s off as ‘unsafe’. What animal-experiments CANNOT DO is tell you how humans are going to respond because one must first ALREADY know the human response before one can proceed to look for it amongst the myriad of conflicting outcomes that animal experiments provide. You cannot discover the human response in animals unless you ALREADY KNOW the human response that you’re looking for from having observed it FIRST in humans, hence the myth that misleading animal-data can be circumvented by doing more animal experiments BEFORE proceeding to human ones can be seen for what it represents…a load of nonsense. Any number of animal experiments will simply produce lots of misleading, contradictory and useless outcomes that no-one can make head nor tail of in the absence of an ALREADY KNOWN human response to tally up with an appropriate animal response, presuming one has actually been found.


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Debatewise debateANIMAL TESTING FOR MEDICAL RESEARCH


Future medical developments will depend on continued animal research


In the hunt for vaccines and therapies for AIDS, Parkinson’s Disease and all other human diseases, animal research is at the forefront. If history has shown us anything, it is that animal research has consistently provided answers – 71 of the Nobel Prizes for Medicine won in the last 103 years were awarded to scientists who used animals in their research.

Vivisector Nobel Prize winners have used vivisection because that is how they were trained. They know nothing else. When you have to choose a prize winner from a list of vivisectors, you are going to have to choose a vivisector. Except when someone finds the usual cause of gastric ulcers by testing on themselves, after that ignorant James Black held up research by his erroneous conclusions based on torturing non-humans. But then you deny their findings for ten years before grudgingly having to accept them.
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Animal ‘research’ does not have the capacity to be at the ‘forefront’ of medical research for the simple to understand reason that BEFORE one could even venture to try and create an accurate ‘model’ of a human disease one would have to ALREADY understand it from having studied it FIRST in humans!
This assumes that the creation of an animal ‘model’, in any meaningful sense of the word, is even possible, which it is not due to reasons of species variation. Firstly, other species differ in form and function. They do not possess the appropriate, i.e. identical, internal or external anatomy or physiology to start with.
Secondly, when one attempts to ‘recreate’ a spontaneous disease, which only occurs naturally in a particular species, namely humans, through artificial and arbitrary means, what you get is in no way identical to the human disease it is intended to ‘model’. Further, such is the random and haphazard nature of the ‘method’ used to attempt to create it, you get a different outcome every time. Each attempt at a ‘model’ bears little resemblance to the last, let alone to the natural, spontaneously developing human condition.


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Debatewise debateANIMAL TESTING FOR MEDICAL RESEARCH


Animal research is extremely tightly regulated by independent authorities


In the last five years in the UK, no fewer than three independent inquiries have been carried out into the effectiveness of animal research in developing medicines for human use. The House of Lords Select Committee, the Parliamentary Animal Procedures Committee and the independent Nuffield Council on Bioethics all concluded that testing on animals is a scientifically sound method, has yielded great results in the past, and is crucial for future advances.
The animals used for research in the United Kingdom must be specially bred by registered license holders. Research is not performed on stray animals or unwanted pets. This is strictly illegal. The use of chimpanzees, orangutans, and gorillas has also been banned since 1986. The vast majority of research is conducted on rodents, with a smaller percentage using fish, reptiles, and birds. A very small percentage is conducted in larger mammals.

Independent enquiries!? There’s too much money at stake for an enquiry to be independent. About as independent as the enquiry into the Saudi/BAe corruption scandal.
Those who regulate vivisection are few and overworked. That is if they have not already been corrupted – as is the case in the US with the FDA and other regulatory bodies. With the millions spent on lobbying governments this situation is unlikely to change soon. £11 million was enough to buy the British Government. Are we supposed to applaud that most research is done on rodents? They feel pain and fear just as much as humans.
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Animal-experiments have never been scientifically evaluated:
The Toxicology Working Group of the House of Lords Select Committee on Animals in Scientific Procedures in 2002 recommended that "the reliability and relevance of all
existing animal tests should be reviewed as a matter of urgency."
The recently published Nuffield Council report on animal experiments recommended:
"At present, there is a relatively limited number of useful systematic reviews and meta-reviews that address the question of the scientific validity of animal experiments and tests. In principle, it would therefore be desirable to undertake
further systematic reviews and meta-analyses to evaluate more fully the predictability and transferability of animal models"
This Government came to power promising a Royal Commission on animal experimentation.
Yet Home Office Minister Caroline Flint stated in 2004 that the Government "has not commissioned or evaluated any formal research on the efficacy of animal experiments and has no plans to do so."


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Debatewise debateANIMAL TESTING FOR MEDICAL RESEARCH


Couldn’t agree less old chap


Only unsympathetic people towards animals would think this!! What if you were the one with drops of neat shampoo being put into your eyes, unable to blink to wash it out? How would you like to have a cigarette put in your mouth and not be able to remove it because your hands were tied? The list goes on, and so does the pain for animals!! As for saying that it helps research, crap!! an animals body and make-up is not the same as a human…so why would you need to experiment on them? I say, anyone that thinks that, should be locked in a room with the animals they have tested on!!
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Too true. But these people have no conscience and don’t care about causing suffering. Just like slave traders or concentration camp guards had no care for the humans they tortured.



Debatewise debateANIMAL TESTING FOR MEDICAL RESEARCH


Animal experiments retard medical progress due to providing misleading results


Antibiotics
"Clinical Medical Discoveries by Dr M. Beddow Bayly, M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P. outlines a brief history of the discovery and application, by human observations, of antibiotic penicillin until the advent of Prof. A. Fleming and Sir Howard Florey, who carried out all their initial experiments in vitro. More recently Dr Robert Sharpe, basing his article on Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics by T. Koppanyi and M.A. Avery, Vol. 7, 1966, pages 250-270, agreed with a report made by Hans Ruesch in Naked Empress (or the Great Medical Fraud) that Fleming, being worried that penicillin might be de-activated by blood, injected a sample into rabbits, which died. Discouraged he abandoned penicillin until Oxford scientists Florey and Chain resurrected it for further tests. Being out of stock of the usual guinea-pigs on the day of the trials they used mice which it cured and penicillin was acclaimed. Later trials with guinea-pigs proved fatal, even with tiny amounts. Another coincidence occurred when Fleming was reluctant to inject penicillin into the spine of a critically-ill patient and Florey tried it on cats. As the patient was near death with insufficient time to observe the cats Fleming took a gamble and administered the penicillin. The patient lived and the cats died. Thus humans received penicillin despite the erroneous and inconclusive trials with animals which almost resulted in its rejection and abandonment.
Despite its apparent success, evidence shows that the discovery of antibiotics might have been a devil in disguise. In Slaughter of the Innocent Hans Ruesch reveals reports from many doctors and medical institutions warning that antibiotics weaken the organisms while strengthening the various strains of bacteria to such an extent that some of them eventually defy every type of antibiotic.
Ruesch points out that by the end of the 1940s antibiotics were so overprescribed that the result was the production of stronger and stronger bacteria, and weaker and weaker human beings. By the 1950s various hospitals registered outbreaks of epidemics that no antibiotic was able to cure. Brian Inglis reported that in the U.S. there were "over a hundred such epidemics in a single year, of which one killed 22 patients in a Texas hospital". When the medical authorities argued that the use of antibiotics was justified in spite of the recognised damage, John Lear, former science editor of the Saturday Review wrote in a "miracle drugs" article about a study made by Charles Henry Kempe, University of Chicago medical researcher, as follows:
"The record shows that prophylactic antibiotics do more harm than good. Dr Kempe’s study cited in this connection the result of a 250 ‘clean’ operation. Of the 154 not subjected to prophylactic antibiotics only 7.8% developed bacterial aftermath. The remaining 96 patients all received prophylactic antibiotics, of which 37.5% were subjected to bacterial complications." "
Aids
http://www.mrmcmed.org/aids.html
"As James Stott and Neil Almond warn, vaccine studies in chimpanzees may be totally inapplicable to humans: first, chimpanzees are too scarce for use in numbers sufficient to provide statistically significant results; second, AIDS-related experiments on chimpanzees employ laboratory-adapted strains of HIV-1 that differ from the naturally incurring [sic] virus; third, HIV-1’s more limited replication in chimpanzees may make successful vaccination against the virus far easier in chimpanzees than in humans.7 Studies of people who have remained AIDS-free despite chronic HIV infection8 are far more likely to reveal means of enhancing human resistance to HIV than are experiments on chimpanzees. "
As usual, a brief rundown of the reasons why animal experiments are not applicable to humans, how money is frittered away on them instead of being diverted to human-based relevant research, where the little we actually know about human diseases is being discovered.
Cancer
"The Orthodox "War on Cancer" Has Failed
"My overall assessment is that the national cancer programme must be judged a qualified failure" Dr. John Bailer, who spent 20 years on the staff of the U.S. National Cancer Institute and was editor of its journal. (3) Dr. Bailer also says: "The five year survival statistics of the American Cancer Society are very misleading. They now count things that are not cancer, and, because we are able to diagnose at an earlier stage of the disease, patients falsely appear to live longer. Our whole cancer research in the past 20 years has been a total failure. More people over 30 are dying from cancer than ever before . . . More women with mild or benign diseases are being included in statistics and reported as being ‘cured’. When government officials point to survival figures and say they are winning the war against cancer they are using those survival rates improperly." "
Diabetes
http://www.nzavs.org.nz/diab.html
"Vivisectionists credit the discovery of insulin to experiments on dogs carried out by Banting and Best in the 1920s, but medical historians, including M. Beddow Bayly, MRCS, LRCP ("Clinical Medical Discoveries"), have pointed out that the association of diabetes with degenerative changes in the Beta cells in the pancreas was a well-recognized clinical discovery before animal experiments in this connection were carried out. The discovery, isolation and application of insulin were achieved in 1915 by one professor Schafer, a renowned physiologist. Bayly noted that subsequent experiments on thousands of dogs proved nothing of value to human medicine since, as scientifically recognized, the dogs were not suffering from diabetes."



Debatewise debateANIMAL TESTING FOR MEDICAL RESEARCH


Animal experiments keep unsafe substances on the market due to inability to reproduce the effects


Smoking and lung cancer
By the mid 1950s more than a dozen epidemiological studies had identified the link between smoking and lung cancer. Nevertheless, some still argued that the association was unwarranted because no one had produced the disease in laboratory animals. In a review of the evidence, Northrup states that the ‘inability to induce experimental cancers, except in a handful of cases, during 50 years of trying, casts serious doubt on the validity of the cigarette-lung cancer theory’.
Health warnings were delayed costing many lives. Yet despite years of further experimentation, it proved ‘difficult or impossible’ to induce lung cancer in animals using the method (inhalation) by which people are exposed to the smoke.
X-rays and the foetus
In 1956 British doctors drew attention to a link between X-rays during pregnancy and subsequent childhood cancers. Within a few years similar findings were reported in American children. But for a quarter of a century, scientists questioned whether X-rays were actually the cause and cited animal experiments to show that the foetus is not especially sensitive to radiation.[32] However, it seems that compared with other species, the human foetus is more susceptible to the carcinogenic effects of X-rays, and during the 1980s further observational studies confirmed the hazards, particularly in early pregnancy.
Reported in S. Peller, Quantitative Research in Human Biology (Wright and Sons, 1967). E. Northrup, Science Looks at Smoking (Conrad-McCann, 1957).
Editorial, Lancet, 1977, June 25, 1348-1349; F.T. Gross et al, Health Physics, 1989, vol 56, 256.
E.B. Harvey et al, New England Journal of Medicine, 1985, February 28, 541-545.
Pneumoconiosis and the coal industry
It has long been known that coal miners suffer the lung disease pneumoconiosis, but for many years researchers believed that breathing coal dust was ‘completely innocuous’ and that respiratory illness arose from the silica that sometimes contaminates the coal. The idea originated from the laboratory where pure coal dust had no harmful effects on animals’ lungs.
Reliance on these experiments proved devastating. Since there is little exposure to silica in bituminous coal pits, mining was not considered dangerous, and few observational studies were carried out in the US. As a result there was almost no information on American coal workers’ pneumoconiosis until the Public Health Service performed studies as recently as 1962/63.
The animal data were in fact contradicted by the discovery that men who worked with pure coal dust or carbon alone also developed pneumoconiosis, evidence that shows that coal dust can cause lung disease in the absence of silica. The animal tests were further undermined when coal dust, collected at a coal face where pneumoconiosis among miners was high, proved innocuous to laboratory rats.
Editorial, British Medical Journal, 1953, January 17, 144-146.
W.K.C. Morgan in Occupational Lung Diseases, Eds. W.K.C. Morgan and A. Seaton (Saunders, 1982); see also ref.24.




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Comments about this debate

7 months ago, Arborreal Arthur said:


It would be nice if the pro-vivisection side would present scientific evidence in support of their arguments, instead of a list of just-so claims.



7 months ago, Sileg said:


Vivisectors and drug companies tell too many lies. Nothing they say can be relied on. There is too much money involved for the truth or human suffering to get in the way of the quest for profits and fame.



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