Re: Hi Doug

On 21 May 2006 07:08:41 -0700, iiiiDougiiii put finger to keyboard and
typed:

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?

You don't appear to have read what I wrote. There is no such thing as
a perfectly safe medicine. All medicines have some side-effects or
potential harmful effects. It's possible to commit suicide with
medicines bought over the counter. Nothing will ever guarantee that
medicines are 100% safe, because no such guarantee will ever be
possible. The fact that people die from harmful side-effects of drugs
isn't due to a failure of the testing system, it's due to an inherent
limitation in pharmaceutical medicine itself.

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"

So? Nearly everyone supports the aim of reducing animal testing where
possible and minimising it where there is no alternative. You can't
claim the moral high ground on that point, because everyone else is up
there with you. It's the attitude to essential testing that marks the
difference betwen the informed and the uninformed.

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.

It isn't needless if it means a cure for AIDS, or some other serious
disease.

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.

Go back and re-read what I wrote about Herceptin. I'll take the chance
on side-effects if the alternative is a higher probability of death.

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?

The APC website. Go and read it yourself.

Mark
--
Visit: http://names.orangehedgehog.com - British surname distribution profiles
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