- The common claim that "all medical breakthroughs
relied on animals" is a myth. Anaesthetics,
antibiotics, aspirin, antidepressants, chemotherapy and
many other advances owe nothing to animals. They
arose through serendipity, ingenuity and astute clinical
observation.
- Penicillin, the polio vaccine and many other therapies
were delayed because of misleading test results in
animals. People died as a result of these delays. Now
millions of women on hormone replacement therapy
are at twice the risk of breast cancer
and heart disease, thanks to tests in monkeys which
predicted the opposite.
- Side effects of prescription drugs are now the
fourth biggest killer in the western world. Tossing
a coin would predict drug safety better than animal
tests - even a former Director of Huntingdon Life
Sciences admits that! Drugs would be safer for
patients if they were tested not in animals but in
human tissues, human DNA chips, computer models of
human organs and finally in risk-free microdose
studies in human volunteers.
- 320,000 heart attacks and strokes caused by Vioxx
between 2000 and 2004 could have been avoided by
employing human-based methods of safety testing in
place of animal tests, which actually indicated that
Vioxx was cardioprotective!
- This issue is not about science versus animal
rights: it is about whether animal experimentation
is in the best interests of patients. The evidence
is pointing very firmly towards the fact that reliance
on animal data is misleading and often very dangerous.
- Human health has suffered enormously thanks to
animal research, which has misled and delayed
medical progress for decades. Smoking cigarettes
and eating lots of cholesterol were given the
thumbs-up by animal experimentation. Probably
no two mistakes have cost as many lives. In
1998, Dr Richard Klausner, director of the US National
Cancer Institute (NCI), admitted, "The history
of cancer research has been a history of curing cancer
in the mouse. We have cured mice of cancer for decades
- and it simply didn't work in humans". The
NCI believes we have lost cures for cancer because
they were ineffective in mice.
- Everything we know about AIDS, Alzheimer’s,
Parkinson’s and many other diseases has been
learned from studying patients, their families and
their tissues, including their blood. This is despite
the majority investment of time, money and other
resources being channelled into animal ‘models’ of
those diseases, with precious little return.
- There is significant and growing doubt about animal
experimentation amongst the scientific community.
83% of GPs want to see animal testing scientifically
evaluated, as do thousands of doctors and scientists
represented by Europeans for Medical Progress: www.curedisease.net
- In the light of Vioxx; the biggest drug disaster
in history, and the unacceptably large and accelerating
number of deaths from adverse drug reactions, an
independent scientific evaluation of animal testing
is the only responsible course of action.
- An increasingly common industry perspective is
voiced by drug discovery company Pharmagene: “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?”
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For
further information about this project, email our
Tour Producer David Jackson |
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Every Breath
Production shot
Autumn 2006
by Dominic
Ibbotson |
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