Re: Hi Doug


Mark Goodge wrote:
On 20 May 2006 23:12:49 -0700, iiiiDougiiii put finger to keyboard and
typed:

http://www.speakcampaigns.org.uk/badscience.php/

Unscientific - Unsafe

That's a very good assesment of the content of that URL. It's
unscientific, and it wwould be unsafe to rely on it.

And your sources are...?

One of the biggest preconceptions concerning animal research is that
human illnesses can be studied in another species. In reality, diseases
vary from species to species.

No shit, Sherlock. I don't suppose it's occurred to you that the
researchers might be aware of this as well? Or even that in some cases
diseases can be the same. After all, if they were always different,
why care about bird flu?

How many are cross-species transferable and how many are not? The fear
about bird flu is not that it can be transfered to a few humans working
in close proximity to birds but that it might be transferrable between
humans.

Sometimes experimenters try to recreate some of the symptoms, and they
may be able to get cases where it looks similar, but that's hardly
science. Out of all illnesses known to humanity, less than 2% of them
are ever seen in any non-human animal. It's a problem they still
haven't overcome.

That's not true. The person making that claim is either ignorant or a
liar.

And your source for this is...?

The scientific director of Huntingdon Life Sciences, one of the biggest
drug and product testing labs in the world has estimated that the
accuracy of using animals to predict the human effect is "between
5%-25%".

So to be generous to him, in three times out of four we get a false
result which is then used to decide whether the product is used in
humans.

No; it means that in three out of four cases we either need to do more
research before testing on humans or the drug is simply not developed
further.

Your sourced stats are...?

And the results of this reliance on vivisection?

The human cost is massive.

Birth defects: They occurred in about 3 in 100,000 live births in the
late 1940s, by the end of the century there were over 800 per 100,000.
The most in-depth study to date, by German doctors concluded 61% of
birth defects and 88% of stillbirths were definitely, directly caused
by animal experiments.

This is not only a lie, it's ridiculous. How on earth could animal
testing *cause* birth defects in humans?

If the drugs are OK on animals then why not on humans?

Deaths and serious injuries: In 1998 an American medical journal
concluded that 106,000 deaths PER YEAR in the US alone were caused by
medical drugs passed safe on animals.

That's because 106,000 deaths per year are caused by pharmacuetical
drugs, full stop. Drugs are often dangerous things, they can have
serious side-effects even if they achieve their actual aim. Take, for
example, Herceptin, a drug which has been in the news a bit recently
due to campaigns by breast cancer sufferers to be prescribed it for
early stage cancer (when it has a much greater chance of saving their
lives) than only for late stage. All very well and good, but one thing
that isn't mentioned in the news reports is that a side-effect of
Herceptin is a massively increased risk of heart failure. So much so,
that the first doses of Herceptin by a new recipient have to be taken
as a hospital in-patient, where they will monitor your vital signs
closely as they gradually build up the dose to an effective level, and
only allow you to continue with the treatment if the indications are
that your heart will cope with it. But, despite these precautions,
some people taking Herceptin still die of a heart attack. That's a
death caused by a drug which has been tested on animals, of course,
because all drugs are tested on animals. But most cancer patients,
given the choice, will accept the risk of a Herceptin-induced heart
attack because it's still lower than the risk of simply dying from the
cancer if they don't take it. Doug and his friends, of course, would
deny them even that and insist that development of Herceptin should
never have taken place at all.

So animal testing is no guarantee of the safety of human medicines?

Vivisection continues for two main reasons.

One is the drug industry. It allows drugs to be approved quickly, and
because animals give a variety of results, it virtually guarantees
entry onto the marked where it is earning money. It also provides an
obstacle to legal action when drugs go wrong, because with animal tests
performed, negligence becomes hard to prove.

Animal testing doesn't allow drugs to be approved quickly, it's a
basic requirement for them to be approved at all. All new drugs are
tested on animals, without exception. They are required to be, by law,
in every country of the world which has an aproval regime in place.

What about the other considerations mentioned?

The other is that it's so easy to publish. "A rat is an animal which
when injected produces a paper" as the saying goes, which means easy
work in this 'publish or perish' scientific world. Clinical research is
infinitely more valuable, but requires ingenuity, planning, people
skills, and time. Anyone can do animal experiments - they may not give
useful results but at least they're results.

The other main reason why drugs are tested on animals is because the
scientific community is almost united in agreeing that this is
necessary.

By 'scientifc community' don't you mean those in the employ of the
drugs industries and the government? However, the latter do seem to
have some concerns about animal testing and wish to reduce it.

Among those who actually have responsibility for creating
and dispensing new drugs, there is virtually no significant opposition
to the use of animal testing as a key part of the development process.

Then why is there a an obvious desire to reduce animal testing and seek
alternatives?

Opposition to vivisection on medical grounds is growing, and is in
direct proportion to awareness of the facts. The more people know about
vivisection, the less they like it. It's a massive subject, but you
don't need to be a professor to understand it.

Opposition to medical testing is growing among the ill-informed, but,
as events in Oxford have shown, most people support it when they
realise how important such testing is.

So you think the Home Office is ill-informed? Didn't you read my
previous quote from them which demonstrates their obvious concerns
about animal testing?

Here it is again:

"Reducing animal testing

The number of experiments involving live animals has halved in the last
30 years due to the:

* development of new research techniques for example, a technique that
enables testing of new drugs for fever-causing agents using human blood
cells instead of rabbits
* introduction of rigorous standards stipulating that animal tests
can't be conducted when there is a validated alternative research
technique"

Britain is the largest user of primates for research in Europe. In
2001, 3,342 monkeys were used in 3,986 'procedures' - an increase of
13% from the previous year.

Good. That means we're doing a lot of work to develop new and improved
drugs.

And causing lots of needless suffering to primates.

Drugs that might, one day, save my life, or that of my wife, or
our baby daughter, as well as possibly turning the tide against AIDS
and reducing the number of people lost to cancer.

Or might just kill you and yours because that which is safe on animals
may not be safe for humans.

Heck, they might
even save Doug's life one day, if he can bear to think about it.

The public is strongly opposed to the use of primates in laboratories
and 133 MPs have signed an Early Day Motion calling for a total ban on
the research on primates.

That's 133 MPs out of a total of 646 who are prepared to sign a motion
without fully understanding it. Heck, I'm surprised the figure is that
low!

That is very patronising of you to assume they don't understand it.
Again, where are your 'authortiative' sources on which you rely?

Even the UK government's own Animal Procedures Committee has stated
that experimental drugs need not be tested on animals before being
tested on human beings

That's another straightforward lie. What the APC actually said was
that some experimental drugs can be tested on humans without being
first tested on primates.

Source?

That doesn't mean no animals at all, it
simply means that in some cases, they can go straight from testing on
small animals (rats, mice, guinea pigs, etc) to humans without the
usual intermediate stage of testing on primates. And it doesn't mean
all drugs, just those where we already have enough data from similar
drugs to be able to accurately predict the effects on humans following
small animal tests and computer simulations. And, finally, it only
applies to experimental drugs - that is, where the testing is still at
the research stage and no end product is still in sight. If the drug
moves beyond that to the possibility of licensing and production, then
it needs to go through the full testing procedure in order to be
prescribed to non-volunteers in a genuine medical situation.

I can sense that you are conerned that the drugs upon which you rely
may not be as safe as your previously assumed due to testing
methodology. Join the club!

--
UK Radical Campaigns
www.zing.icom43.net
"Disssent without resistance is consent."
Henry Thoreau

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