But here is something to get the debate started, perhaps:
Fifty Disasters of Animal Testing
The authors of that article use disaster in a very different way from how I do.
Just a few examples. I haven't read all 50, but have skimmed, so the fact that I don't mention any other specific cases is in no way an indication that I agree with them.
For example, their #2, I wouldn't call the difficulty to detect smoking related cancers in mice a disaster; even if those tests had been successful, it wouldn't have stopped smoking, as we see today from the number of people who continue to smoke despite very clear evidence that causes many horrid diseases. And if animal testing hadn't been done at all, there's no evidence that people would have stopped smoking sooner than they did (if they did). It's clear that the tobacco companies knew that tobacco was carcinogenic long before the public got that information, whether or not they used animal studies.
Their #7: I highly doubt that the absence of animal models showing a relationship between high cholesterol/high fat diets and heart disease affected the eating habits of very many, if indeed any, people.
On #18, it may just mean that they used the wrong animals to test the drugs on. Similarly with other examples where animal testing failed to show up results that later showed up in humans.
As I said in my other post, I don't claim that animal testing is perfect.
The relevant question under discussion is whether we can create safe and effective drugs without any animal testing. None of these examples address that question.
The only thing that will answer that question is to show that in NO case has animal testing kept off the market a drug which looked good in all its other tests and which, but for negative results shown by the animal testing, would have been put on the market and subsequently caused human deaths or dire consequences.
If there were no such cases, I would agree with your position.
But I believe that there are drugs that would have been released but for animal testing, and which if released would have caused significant disasters.
That's the issue, not whether animal testing is perfect, which is what the "50 disasters" addresses and which is a claim I have never made and would never make. |
