The problem with animal research

by John Pranger

• Sponsored by the Animal Defense & Anti-Vivisection Society of BC. vivisectionresearch.ca

The arrival in Canada each year of monkeys destined for the laboratory shows the entrenched nature of Canada’s R&D community. While the use of animals in medical research and toxicity testing is being scaled back elsewhere in the world – due to a recognition of the inadequacy of this research – in Canada, more than three million animals are subjected to experimentation in publicly funded institutions every year.

Many of these animals are subjected to procedures involving severe pain “near, at or above the pain tolerance threshold of unanesthetized, conscious animals” (Category of Invasiveness = E). This means that, annually, thousands of animals suffer prolonged, unendurable pain at the hands of Canadian scientists. And these statistics only hold true of those institutes that report to the Canadian Council on Animal Care; private facilities are not compelled to follow CCAC guidelines nor to divulge their animal usage. What makes this sorry situation all the more unacceptable is the plain fact that human medicine has not been improved by the use of animals in this way.

In 2004, the British Medical Journal published an article titled “Where is the evidence that animal research benefits humans?” It states, “The public often consider it axiomatic that animal research has contributed to the treatment of human disease, yet little evidence is available to support this view.” (BMJ, 2004; 328:514-517, 28 Feb)

After over 150 years of animal research, literally billions of animals used, billions of taxpayer dollars spent and regular news articles claiming that animal research benefits humans, this revelation might shock you. Equally, the enormous damage to human health that has been caused by animal experimentation is little known.

Experimenters receive billions of tax and charity dollars to conduct experiments that leading scientists say only serve to hinder and prevent medical progress. Anti-vivisectionist doctors, surgeons and scientists have long denounced animal studies as scientifically invalid – but so far with precious little result. The damage to human health comes in many forms. It ranges from the more visible harm caused by dangerous drugs that have passed animal tests, to more subtle forms such as the medically-invasive attitude that animal experimentation has helped advance. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has reported that 92% of all the drugs found safe and effective in animal tests were either unsafe or ineffective in humans. We’d be better off just flipping a coin!

From Opren to Fen-Phen, from Thalidomide to Vioxx – withdrawn in 2004 after killing more than 100,000 people, having been deemed “safe” after being tested on monkeys and other species ­– the toll of pharmaceutical harm is a devastating indictment of the way we have allowed established science to flourish while more scientifically credible, effective and humane non-animal research remains on the back burner.

Important therapies such as chloroform and penicillin were almost derailed altogether due to their inefficacy in the animal model. Nobody can say how many possible cures have been similarly discarded due to their poor performance in animals. Even the most infinitesimal difference between species can render the data derived from one species inapplicable in another. Cancers that spontaneously arise in humans cannot be understood by artificially inducing tumours in animals under unnatural laboratory conditions. As an exasperated Thomas E. Wagner, senior scientist at Ohio University’s Edison Bio-Technology Institute, put it, “God knows we’ve cured mice of all sorts of tumours. But that isn’t medical research.” (The Columbus Dispatch, March 20, 1998)

Human arthritis cannot be replicated by experiments, which attempt to artificially “recreate” the disease by crushing or hammering the joints of animals. Poisoning the brains of monkeys to simulate Parkinson’s disease results only in Parkinson’s-like symptoms – and all the human tragedy these entail – being forced onto terrified and immobilized monkeys. True PD cannot be replicated in this way. Technological advances have led to the development of far more relevant, human-based approaches to these and other human diseases and must be implemented if we are to conquer human disease. (See: Marius Maxwell, MB,BChir, DPhil – http://www.vero.org.uk/press7.asp

Most current research into degenerative diseases is designed to discover patentable, synthetic drugs that suppress symptoms as a long-term treatment, but don’t heal the patient who is often prescribed a “cocktail” of drugs to counteract the “side-effects” of the previous drugs. Israeli physician Dr. Arie Brecher explains, “From an animal, one can get only a very approximate indication of how a human will react under similar circumstances.

But this is not science – it’s a lottery. However, we are not playing games. At stake are health and life. The day it was decided to develop medicaments using animal models, it was a sad day for mankind. People began to get sick and to die due to medications. A new epoch in medicine started: the epoch of iatrogenic diseases, caused by doctors, by medical therapies. In the US, at least one and a half million people are hospitalized every year due to the intake of drugs and many die. For the first time in history, medicine causes disasters instead of curing illness.” (See: Brecher http://vivisectionresearch.ca/1000MDs.pdf)

Despite continual reports of “imminent medical breakthroughs” and so-called “miracle drugs,” our health situation is not improving. Total spending on health care in Canada is well over $200 billion, growing an estimated five percent per year and threatening to choke the Provincial budgets. The awarding of millions of dollars in Canadian government grants every year to research involving animal experiments is a constant drain on the taxpayer as it displaces money that should be going to patient care and clinical research methods. To make matters worse, the animal researchers alone decide which grant proposals will receive funding; through the system of peer review, vivisectors submit grant proposals and sit on the same committees that approve such grants. In any other area, this conflict of interest and corresponding lack of cost-benefit analysis would simply not occur. In the self-monitored world of animal research, it is business as usual.

In addition to taxpayer sponsored government grants, animal research is funded by private charities. This money is donated by well-meaning people in good faith that it will be spent on valid research. These people hope that their donations will help find a cure for the disease in question. They may be unaware that their donations help to finance often bizarre, frequently repetitive, always cruel and sadly ineffective animal research.

As medical consumers and taxpayers, we have an absolute right to question the mismanagement of our health and why our healthcare needs are not being advanced. With our money, the biomedical research industry has created a system, which is completely self-monitored and self-regulated. It is imperative that we demand from government that animal experimentation be replaced immediately by the valid research that will enable us to create a healthy – and yes, humane – society.

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John Pranger is a director-emeritus of the Animal Defence and Anti-Vivisection Society of BC. His essays on the history and proliferation of animal experimentation have helped to spearhead the ADAV’s public outreach campaigns, including Stop UBC Animal Research and the new Humane Charities Canada initiative.

EVENT April 16-24 marks the annual World Week for Animals in Laboratories. To become involved or to learn more about the ADAV Society, visit www.stopubcanimalresearch.org