29/01/07 Daily Express

How animal extremists will damage your health

Robert Matthews, Scientist.

The twisted logic of animal rights extremists has always defied belief. How can concern for one form of sentient life justify violence against another? Try telling that to the activists who earlier this month sent a letter bomb to an Oxfordshire biotech company, injuring the woman who unwittingly opened it.

There are signs, though, that the extremists are fighting a losing battle. Figures just released show there were just 20 violent animal protests last year- down from more than 250 in 2003.

New legislation has certainly played a big role but so has revulsion at their actions. Even activists admit they were sickened in 2004 after a body was stolen from a grave because the dead woman was a relative of a guinea pig farmer.

All the extremists have succeeded in is polarising the vivisection debate. It is now all but impossible to voice qualms about the effectiveness of animals in experiments without being howled down as an animal rights sympathiser. And this has obscured the fact that crucial questions still need to be addressed, including the most important of all: are animal experiments medically justified?

The scientific community must share the blame for this state of affairs. For years, prestigious organisations like the Royal Society have rebutted criticism by claiming “virtually every” modern medical breakthrough has depended on animal experiments.

It is certainly true that all the latest wonder drugs were first proven in tests on animals. But that’s because such testing has been mandatory since the thalidomide disaster.

Just because something is mandatory does not mean it is useful, however. After all, every wonder drug has also been developed by people in lab-coats but no one would argue that wearing lab-coats is crucial to medical progress. Yet time and again otherwise brilliant scientists fall for this fallacy, ignoring all the examples of animal tests proving misleading.

And as new research in the British Medical Journal shows, there is no shortage of those. A team from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine has trawled medical literature for reports of animal experiments, comparing the outcome with those found in studies on humans.

But the fact that such a systematic comparison has rarely been attempted is itself disquieting. The outcome is hardly a ringing endorsement of the reliability of animal experiments either. Sometimes their results were confirmed by human trials but all too often the animal tests were so badly done that it was impossible to tell either way.

Perhaps animals really are helpful in predicting what will happen in certain areas of medicine but as things stand, it is impossible to tell with any confidence.

The picture that emerges is of scientists simply cranking through the rigmarole of animal testing because it is mandatory, not because they believe in it. Nowhere is that more clear than in the pharmaceutical industry, which has been hit by a spate of major set-backs linked to the inadequacies of animal tests. In October, AstraZeneca halted development of a drug for stroke victims when positive results in animals failed to translate in humans.

It was the third failure in a row for the company but it should have surprised no one. Over the years, around 100 stroke drugs have shown promise in tests on animals but none was effective in humans.

Last month Pfizer, the world’s largest drugs company, gave up development of a cholesterol-lowering drug which proved too dangerous for humans. Having sunk £400m into the project, the company announced it was sacking 10,000 personnel, 10% of its workforce.

But if not animal testing, then what? Alternatives can and are being developed. And they are being properly validated, which is more than can be said for standard animal tests.

The research has become more urgent, following some well-publicised disasters. For example, the notorious drug trial last year that left six volunteers fighting for their lives led British researchers to invent a lab test that detects the dangerous side effects that were completely missed when the drug was tested on monkeys.

One thing seems certain: unless more alternatives are found- and quickly- our reliance on animal testing will prove far more harmful than the mindless actions of a few thugs.

The author is visiting reader in science at Aston University.

Reproduced by kind permission of Robert Matthews & the Daily Express.