Animal testing to save the lives of other animals (including us...)

Needless to say i am not referring to ALL chemicals. Thousands of artificial substances (including chemicals, pharmaceuticals etc) are harmful to humans though and they are animal 'tested'

Purple Fae said "One thing I find interesting with any research, is people dismiss a negative or unexpected result that's a bit astray as a waste of time/proof the research isn't any good to anyone. Something failing can still be usable data. Knowing in x species something works but it won't work in y still adds to our knowledge and used to obtain results in the future."  

If animal 'tests' were usually correct then your comment would be valid but in fact it is unusual for the animal 'test' to be correct as earlier quotes show quite well. here are some more...

"More than 800 chemicals have been defined as teratogens in laboratory animals, but only a few of these, approximately 20, have been shown to be teratogenic in humans. This discrepancy can be attributed to differences in metabolism, sensitivity and exposure time." Schmid, Trends in Pharmacological Sciences, vol 8, p 133.

20 correct out of 800, that means the animal 'test' is wrong 97.5% of the time!

These quotes are from the Handbook of Laboratory Animal Science, the university text of the subject... 1994

What is noxious or ineffective in nonhuman species can be innoxious or effective in humans. For example, penicillin is fatal for guinea pigs but generally well tolerated by human beings; aspirin is teratogenic in cats, dogs, guinea pigs, rats, mice, and monkeys but obviously not in pregnant women despite frequent consumption. Handbook of Laboratory Animal Science Volume II Animal Models, p4, Svendensen and Hau (Eds.) (CRC Press).

Uncritical reliance on the results of animal tests can be dangerously misleading and has cost the health and lives of tens of thousands of humans. Handbook of Laboratory Animal Science Volume II Animal Models, p4, Svendensen and Hau (Eds) (CRC Press).

1987

Drugs known to damage the human foetus are found to be safe in 70% of cases when tried on primates. Developmental Toxicology: Mechanisms and Risk, p313, McLachlan, Pratt, and Markert (Eds).

"...there is no ideal animal model to extrapolate teratogenicity results to human exposure because of species sensitivity and species difference." Dr Lin, In Vitro Toxicology, vol 1.

And again the REAL reason for the phony 'tests'...1983

"The great majority of perinatal toxicological studies seem to be intended to convey medico-legal protection to the pharmaceutical houses and political protection to the official regulatory bodies, rather than produce information that might be of value in human therapeutics. Prof Hawkins, Drugs and Pregnancy: Human Teratogenesis and Related Problems, p 41-49 (publ. Churchill Livingstone).

Continued...Cancer here is what the director of the largest cancer research institute in the world has to say..."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." Dr Richard Klausner, Director, National Cancer Institute, LA Times, May 6. 1998

and the largest private cancer research institute...1981 Congressional Testimony by Dr. Irwin Bross, former Director of the Sloan-Kettering, the largest cancer research institute in the world, and then Director of Biostatistics at Roswell Park Memorial Institute for Cancer Research, Bufallo, NY: "The uselessness of most of the animal model studies is less well known...Indeed, while conflicting animal results have often delayed and hampered advances in the war on cancer, they have never produced a single substantial advance either in the prevention or treatment of human cancer."


2011

Indeed, because oncology drugs have a success rate of only 5%, it is clear that animal models are only marginally effective.
M.B. Esch, T.L. King and M.L. Shuler, The Role of Body-on-a-Chip Devices in Drug and Toxicity Studies, Annu. Rev. Biomed. Eng. 2011. 13:55–72 (doi:10.1146/annurev-bioeng-071910-124629)2010

5% success means animal 'tests' are wrong 95% of the time here!

2007

We have learned well how to treat cancer in mice and rats but we still can’t cure people. Professor Colin Garner, quoted in Accelerator MS Is a Powerful New Tool, Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News, Vol. 27, No. 15.

2006

We do trials in people because animal models do not predict what will happen in humans. Dr Sally Burtles, Cancer Research UK, Report of the Expert Scientific Group on phase one clinical trials, following the TGN1412 clinical trial disaster.

You really have to design the medicine for the species of interest…You'll find it very rare to find a medicine that will work in both… Patrick M. O'Connor, head of oncology research for Pfizer, quoted in The New York Times, 24 November.

This link will give an example of how people have been lied to on this subject, even by peter Singer, a man sponsored by the biggest animal experimenters in the world
http://ajudem-nos.blogspot.com/2007/06/peter-singer-story-true-1.html

Thanks for this post. Unfortunately the belief that humans benefit from animal experiments is still widespread. The 'alternative' to ending animal experiments is to engage is science and therefore cure human diseases...see http://www.safermedicines.org/quotes/immunology.shtml

AIDS...so far 80 (yes eighty) vaccines for AIDs have been successful...in monkeys, none of them has worked in humans...and this from the closest animal to us, all other species are even less predictive.

2002

If you want your vaccine to work in a human, you’d better get it into a human, quickly. Otherwise you’re going to spend a lot of time with animal studies and never be able to predict what it will do in people. Prof. Bob Edelman, June 2002. http://www.antigenics.com/whitepapers/qs21_adjuvant.html

2009

"If you make a drug that's effective against HIV, sometimes it works against SIV and sometimes it doesn't. So that basically devalues SIV as an animal model for doing experiments involved with developing drugs…The slight problem (with using monkeys as an animal model for AIDS in humans) is the monkeys don't go on to develop AIDS, they don't get sick." Dr Paul Bieniasz of the Rockefeller University in New York. Quoted in Scientists make HIV that can infect monkeys, Reuters, 3rd March.

"Animal models are not suitable for predicting the immunogenicity of therapeutic mAbs [monoclonal antibodies] in humans, and transposition of the immunogenic potential of therapeutic antibodies in animals to the human situation has no scientific rationale, even in primates" - Loisel, S., M. Ohresser, M. Pallardy, D. Dayde, C. Berthou, G. Cartron, and H. Watier. 2007. Relevance, advantages and limitations of animal models used in the development of monoclonal antibodies for cancer treatment. Crit Rev Oncol Hematol 62 (1):34-42

"The relevance of animal testing, whether artificially created disease models or healthy animals for toxicology, has to be very seriously questioned for testing of human-specific biologic drugs," notes immunotherapeutics expert David Glover. "That's one of the key lessons of TGN1412." Peter Mitchell, Nature Biotechnology 25, 485 - 486 (2007)

Cancer...not only do animal experiments fail to cure cancer, but human carcinogens  are animal "tested', in other words animal experimentation causes cancer but does not cure it. see http://www.safermedicines.org/quotes/cancer.shtml

I have posted re cancer a couple of days ago. Here are some more...2005

Given that many of these investigational anticancer drugs eventually fail, the animal models on which clinical trials are predicated must at best be limited in power, and at worst wildly inaccurate. Dr Alexander Kamb, Global Head of the Oncology Disease Area at the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, 4, 161 - 165.

The problem with animal carcinogenicity tests is not their lack of sensitivity for human carcinogens, but rather their lack of human specificity. A positive result has poor predictive value for humans. Knight, Bailey & Balcombe, British Medical Journal USA, Vol. 5, p477.

2004

It’s been well known for maybe two decades that many of these preclinical human cancer models have very little predictive power in terms of how actual human beings – actual human tumours inside patients – will respond…Preclinical models of human cancer, in large part, stink…Hundreds of millions of dollars are being wasted every year by drug companies using these [animal] models…Prof. Robert Weinberg, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Fortune, 9th March.

[mouse models are] woefully inadequate…if you look at the millions and millions and millions of mice that have been cured, and you compare that to the relative success, or lack thereof, that we've achieved in the treatment of metastatic disease clinically, you realize that there just has to be something wrong with those models. Homer Pearce, research fellow at Eli Lilly. Fortune, 9th March.

Hi Scuba, please look through my responses. If you have any evidence for your belief that humans benefit from animal experiments please post that. PS, did you use the name "Shooba" and make similar claim on ALV's site? http://forums.alv.org.au/forum_posts.php?id=35&start=0

Sorry for the long posts people, but if you look through them you will see that we have been lied to about animal experimentation. We do not benefit from it and in fact it is not possible to base medicine for humans on other species. It is a legal, not a scientific device. Please see these sites to learn the truth and be an effective anti vivisectionist. Thankyou Animals Australia for telling the truth about animal experimentation, it is not applicable to humans.

www.safermedicines.org www.vivisectioninformation.com www.mrmcmed.org www.speakcampaigns.org www.health.org.nz www.vernoncoleman.com www.vivisectionresearch.ca www.navs.org www.buav.org www.bava.org www.pnc.com.au/~cafmr www.dlrm.org www.humaneresearch.org.au

Re. other animals, even then animal experimentation is unnecessary. Clinical observation (observing the sick animal) and epidemiology (studying the population of animals to find the cause of the illness and eliminate the cause) remain the 2 most senseible means of eliminating animal illness. It is not necessary to get a healthy animal (even of the same species) and artificially induce illness in that animal.

Even veterinary schools can train vets without the use of animals (eg all UK vet schools have eliminated this).

Re cherry picking, I'll leave that to the supporters of animal experiments, with about 300 million animals killed in 'experioments' each year there is plenty to cherry pick from to come to any conclusion. Re out of date, as humans and mice seperated 70 million years ago its hard to imagine what has changed since 1960 etc, this is less that a ten thousandth of 1% of the time since humans and mice seperated evolutionarily. Even the closest animal to use, primates, seperated 7.5 million years ago.

A way of ensuring that data is accurate is to refer to whole data or a statistically significant random sample. Here is what happens when animal 'tests' are analysed in this way...

"…the best guess for the correlation of adverse reactions in man and animal toxicity data is somewhere between 5% and 25%." [4]4  'Animal Toxicity Studies:Their relevance to man Lumley & Walker (ed) pp57-67, Quay, 1989    

"Most adverse reactions which occur in man cannot be demonstrated, anticipated or avoided by the routine subacute and chronic toxicity experiment."[3]Prof G Zbinden, "Applied Therapeutics", 1966, 8, pp128-133  

In the periods 1978-1988, twenty-five drugs were found to treat stroke in animals.  The number that worked in humans was found to be zero[9].Cerebrovascular Diseases 1979, Raven, p87-91  
'As a very approximate estimate, for any individual drug, [only] up to twenty-five per cent of the toxic effects observed in animal studies might be expected to occur as adverse reactions in man'.[5]Dr. A. P. Fland, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, vol.71, 1978, pp.693-696.

   The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America estimate that

           of the drugs presented to human trials, 5% are eventually approved[7].Reuters News Service, Dec 8, 1998            

The human trials are in three stages.  The first trial involves healthy human volunteers, typically about 20-80.

At this stage eleven out of twelve animal-modelled drugs fail[8].Nature Biotechnology 1998; 16:1294  

Twenty-two drugs to treat spinal cord damage were developed on animals.  None worked in humans.[10]Journal of the American Paralegic Society11;23-25, 1988  


...tell me if you want more

Sorry slightly off topic but.... Arnie why not just link to the pages you got that info from rather than cpy and paste? Then people could see where it came from and look around too?

Sorry.... That just annoyed me as much as people standing right at the exit of the bus trying to get in whilst others try to get out

*facepalm.