Cruelty in Medical Experimentation

Over 70 million animals die in research laboratories each year. Animals used in research range from kittens injected with LSD, to dogs tracheas being ignited, to the decapatation of pig fetuses while still in the womb. There have been many studies done to try to come up with a cure for both cancer and AIDS but nothing has proved effective, which tells us that we need to try a different approach than testing animals. Many of these studies done on cancer and AIDS using animals can't even be linked to humans. There is great dangerous in applying experimental results from animal testing to the treatment of human beings. Animal brains work very differently then human brains so to find a correlation between the two is almost impossible when dealing with causes and treatment of cancer. Artificially induced cancers in animals aren't similar to the spontaneous tumors that arise in humans. In one experiment rats were forced to breath the smoke of 25 cigarettes a day for 14 days to see the effect on the respiratory system. However, the information was absolutely useless, which was concluded after the damage to the rats had been done, because the human respiratory system is completely different than rats respiratory systems. Dr. Irwin Bross, director of Biostatistics at the Roswell Park Memorial Institute for Cancer said "animal tests have never produced a single substantial advance in the prevention or treatment of human cancer." In the area of treatment of cancer, several treatments have proved to be very effective against human tumors that didn't prove at all effective in animal experiments. Almost all of the chemotherapeutic drugs which are highly valuable in treating cancer was found in clinical work, not animal laboratory research. Over 1,400 chimpanzees are currently used in medical experiments in the United States. Most of these chimps are used in the experiments for the treatment and prevention of the AIDS virus. Rhesus, cynomolgus, stumptail, and capuchin monkeys and chimpanzees are used. They are infected with the AIDS virus and then kept in solitary confinement for years. Monkeys are immune to the disease but they watch them for years to see if any sign of the disease develope. Surgeon Hastings Gilford says the "contribution of laboratory experiments is practically nil." These animals are suffering alone and in an unnatural environment at the hands of researchers, just so useless data can be discovered?

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Created 11/29/96