Animal Testing for Medicine

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Recommended: The arguments of animal rights

Animal Testing for Medicine

What do you feel is more important - the life of your child or the

life of a few rats? These comments are often brought up in animal

rights debates. On the one side the animal rights campaigners, on the

other side researchers intent on finding new medicines to improve the

quality of human life.

Animal activists claim that animal testing, or 'vivisection' is a

scientific disaster and that thousands have been injured or killed as

a result of it and time and time again researchers have been lead into

a blind alley.

Vivisection literally means, "cutting while still alive," but these

days it refers to any experiments conducted on animals. According to

the 1999 U.K. Vivisection statistics published by the government, 2.66

million animals were subjected to experiments 'likely to cause pain,

suffering, distress or lasting harm' in the U.K. alone.

Many different kinds of animals suffer this fate, including monkeys,

baboons (including wild-caught baboons), dogs, cats, pigs, rabbits,

mice, rats, gerbils, guinea pigs, sheep, horses, goats, budgerigars

and many others. These experiments include the animals being poisoned,

genetically mutated, infected with lethal pathogens, stressed,

deprived of parental care, irradiated, burnt, blinded, traumatised,

forced to inhale noxious substances and subjected to "interference

with the brain." The most common tests involve dripping materials into

rabbit's eyes or applying substances to the shaved backs of rabbits or

guinea pigs and studying the irritation or damage. Animals are also

force fed or dosed with substances to assess what affects the

substances have. These tests can cause great suffering to the animals.

But surely we need animal experiments to discover how safe new drugs

are before we give them to humans? Or do we? The combination of

Fenfluramine and Dexfenfluramine, touted as the answer to a dieter's

prayer a few years ago, was extensively tested on animals and found to

be very safe. Unfortunately it caused heart valve abnormalities in

humans. Or how about the arthritis drug Opren? Tests on monkeys found

no problems but it killed 61 people before it was withdrawn.

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