Would drugs be safe for
us without first being tested on animals?
Actually, drugs would be safer than they are
now if the animal testing phase was eliminated.
Many studies have shown that animals predict
correctly for humans only 5-25% of the time:
far worse than tossing a coin!
When researchers administer potentially useful
substances to animals, they get plenty of feedback
on the substances' effectiveness in the species
tested. However, results nearly always differ
dramatically between species, and there are no
reliable methods of predicting a human reaction.
Substances that could save many human lives
are not approved because they are harmful to
animals. And substances that are therapeutic
in animals get approved, later harming and sometimes
killing humans.
More than 10,000 people are killed every year
in the UK by side effects of prescription medicines
- now the fourth biggest killer in the western
world. The US figure is over 100,000. Arthritis
painkiller Vioxx, withdrawn in 2004, caused up to 320,000 heart attacks and strokes - as many as 140,000 of them fatal. Animal testing
failed to predict these tragedies, which could
have been reduced or prevented altogether by
modern, human-based tests using DNA chips, human
tissues and micro-dose studies where volunteers
are monitored with PET and other scanners.
British company Pharmagene (now Asterand) uses human tissue
exclusively, with the philosophy "a
flood of new data on human genetics is making
drug research in animals redundant. If you have
information on human genes, what's the point
in going back to animals?"
Many of our most popular drugs can be quite
detrimantal to animals. So there is justifiable
concern that animal tests are preventing us from
acquiring much-needed medications, as Professor
Cohn Dollery stated:
"... for the great
majority of disease entities, the animal models
either do not exist or are really very poor.
[We risk] overlooking useful drugs because
they do not give a response to the animal models
commonly used."[2]
92% of new drugs fail in clinical trials, after
they have passed all the safety tests in animals.
Many drugs that reach the market are later withdrawn
or relabelled because of serious side effects.
Reliance on animal data allows companies to avoid
the expense of bigger and better clinical trials.
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