Letters: Using animals for drug tests is cruel
Sunday was World Day for Animals in Laboratories, which annually calls attention to the plight of millions of animals who live in cages, subjected to harmful, flawed, and costly experimentation.
ISSUE | ANIMAL CRUELTY
Testing costs lives
Sunday was World Day for Animals in Laboratories, which annually calls attention to the plight of millions of animals who live in cages, subjected to harmful, flawed, and costly experimentation.
Defenders of vivisection cite medical breakthroughs, but most of them resulted in spite of - not because of - animal experiments.
An overwhelming number of the animals in research are used to test drugs for safety and effectiveness, even though 95 percent of drugs that pass those tests subsequently fail human clinical trials.
How much time and money and how many animals are lost because of false starts, dead ends, and results that don't translate to humans?
The intrinsic differences between humans and other species demand that human disease and response to drugs be studied in human-relevant systems. Conversely, the intrinsic similarities have ethical consequences that should encourage the development of smarter research methodologies that will provide better, safer, and more effective solutions to human health problems that don't harm animals.
Peggy Cunniff, executive director, National Antivivisection Society, Chicago, pcunniff@navs.org