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Questions and answers

Questions and answers

This is a fairly long document. Here is a list of the questions that are answered. You can go directly to the questions that interest you if you wish.

• Hasn't our life expectancy increased due to animal experiments?

• Don't we need animal experiments to fight killer diseases like cancer?

• Haven't animal experiments produced some useful treatments in the past?

• How would biological products such as insulin and polio vaccine be produced without animals?

• Do animals suffer in experiments?

• Wouldn't medical research come to a standstill without animals?

• Aren't animal experiments necessary to train doctors and vets?

• How would we know if products are safe without animals?

• Don't researchers use alternatives to animals whenever possible?

Hasn't our life expectancy increased due to animal experiments?

Our life expectancy has increased steadily during this century, but only a small part of this increase is due to medical treatments.

According to the Year Book Australia 1997, children at birth had the following life expectancies:

	1901-1910	1995
Girls	59 years	81 years
Boys	55 years	75 years

The Year book gives the following explanation for the reduction in age-adjusted deaths:
" The reduction in the early part of this century is attributed to improvements in living conditions, such as better water supplies, sewage systems, food quality and health education. The continuing reduction in mortality in the latter half of the century is attributed to improving social conditions and advances in medical technology such as mass immunisation and antibiotics.

The past two decades in particular have seen further increases in life expectancy. These increases are due in part to lower infant mortality, fewer deaths among young adults from motor vehicle accidents and fewer deaths among older men from heart disease. The reduction in the number of deaths from heart disease is related to behavioural changes such as dietary improvements, reduced smoking and increased fitness ."

Some medical historians have estimated that modern drugs and vaccines have contributed only 3.5% to the reduction in death rates from 10 major infectious diseases since 1900. The most important factors in reduced death rates were improved standards of living (including better diet and better housing) and hygiene (effective garbage and sewage disposal) (1).

The main causes of death in Australia today are circulatory diseases such as heart attack and stroke (42.6%) and cancer (27.5%). These are to a large extent lifestyle diseases, caused by a high fat diet, lack of exercise, obesity and smoking. Around one half of adult males and one third of adult females are overweight or obese. Around one quarter of the population still smokes (Year Book Australia 1997). The biggest overall improvement in health will come from a healthier lifestyle, not medical interventions based on animal experiments.

Don't we need animal experiments to fight killer diseases like cancer?

No, there are other ways to develop drug treatments, and the vast number of animal experiments done over many years haven't reduced the overall death rate due to cancer.

More and more potential new drug treatments are being tried out in test tubes, using human tumours removed during operations or human cancer cells cultivated in the laboratory. There is quite a lot of variation in tumours, and this approach allows researchers to test many different tumours without having to worry about species differences. It also allows them to very efficiently test different chemicals, combinations of chemicals and different doses.

However, the significance of treatment shouldn't be overestimated. In Australia, 27.5% of all deaths in 1995 were still due to cancer. In the USA, age-adjusted death rates due to cancer increased steadily from 1950 to 1991, in spite of huge sums of money being spent on cancer research. Since 1991, deaths rates among women have levelled off, whereas among men they have declined slightly, probably due to reduced smoking (2).

Reduced death rates due to improved treatments have occurred in some areas, especially in childhood cancers and Hodgkin's disease. In other cases, tests for pre-cancerous changes have reduced deaths, for example, the Pap smear test for changes in the cervix, and tests for polyps in the colon (2). Overall, though, the war against cancer hasn't been won.

It has been estimated that tobacco is responsible for 30% of cancers, and dietary factors for a further 35% (3). In other words, many cancers are preventable by lifestyle changes. A major drop in cancer deaths will come, not from animal experiments, but when people stop smoking, lose weight and reduce the amount of fat and meat in their diets. As a well-known researcher recently concluded: " A national commitment to the prevention of cancer, largely replacing reliance on hopes for universal cure, is now the way to go " (2).

Haven't animal experiments produced some useful treatments in the past?

Yes they have, but whether anything useful comes out of animal experiments in never known until a treatment is tried on humans. There is a lot of luck involved -- sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't.

An area where animal experiments have failed dismally is in stroke research. Over a period of 10 years some 25 drugs have reduced neurone damage in rats with artificially produced strokes. However, none of these drugs has come into clinical use for humans, and those that have been tried didn't work (4). There seem to be some major differences between rats and humans.

On the other hand, some important drugs have been discovered through clinical studies or by sheer chance. For example, the usefulness of digitalis for heart disease, quinine for malaria, ipecac for amoebic dysentery, morphine for pain, and inhalation anaesthetics, was discovered through work with humans (5). These drugs have proved extremely useful in human medicine, but as some researchers have commented: " Had these drugs first been tested in animal experiments for their safety, some of them might never have reached clinical trials"p (6).

The story of penicillin is filled with examples of good luck and sheer chance. Fleming noticed that bacteria wouldn't grow in dishes that had accidentally been contaminated with penicillin mould. However, when he injected penicillin into rabbits, it had no effect. Unbeknowns to Fleming, this particular species excretes penicillin very rapidly in the urine. Fleming lost interest, but Florey tested the antibiotic on deliberately infected mice. He commented on this experiment (5):
"... mice were tried in the initial toxicity tests because of their small size, but what a lucky chance it was, for in this respect man is like the mouse and not the guinea pig. If we had used guinea pigs exclusively, we should have said that penicillin was toxic, and we probably should not have proceeded to try to overcome the difficulties of producing the substance for trial in man" .

Regardless of whether or not animal experiments have produced useful results in the past, this doesn't mean that the same methods should be used for all time. There are now research methods that weren't available in the past, and more could be developed if researchers had a greater will to do so. (See Research without animals ).

The usefulness of some experiments also doesn't make them morally right. The most useful way by far to do medical research would be to use humans, but it is unethical to experiment on people against their will and to cause them harm, regardless of how useful the result would be. The same principle also applies to animals who, like humans, have feelings and lives of their own. They are not just laboratory tools or objects for us to use. (See Animal rights ).

How would biological products such as insulin and polio vaccine be produced without animals?

People who have Type 1 Diabetes need to be given regular doses of insulin because they don't produce enough of their own. In the past this insulin came from pancreas extracts from pigs and cattle. These days, 92% of all insulin in Australia is produced by genetically engineered bacteria, and soon all insulin will be produced in this way.

The human gene which contains the code for the insulin molecule has been inserted into E. coli bacteria. Because of this gene, the bacteria produce human insulin (7).

In 1949 it was shown that the polio virus could be grown in human cell cultures, and from there a vaccine was developed. Instead of using human cells, though, researchers used kidney cells from the African Green monkey, and some other monkey species, to produce the vaccine. This choice produced some major problems (8):

• As a result of handling the monkeys and their tissues, 23 people are known to have died from infectious diseases.

• Several hundred thousand people in the USA were infected with the SV40 virus which changes normal human cells to cancer cells in the test tube. Recently this virus has been linked to certain cancers in the USA (9).

• From 25% to 80% of monkey kidneys were discarded because they were contaminated with 1 or more of 20 known viruses.

• Several species of monkey became endangered because so many were captured for vaccine production.

These problems would not have occurred if there had not been such resistance to using human cells at the time. All Sabin polio vaccine in the UK and Canada is now produced in human cells (9). Several million people have received oral polio vaccine produced in this way without the problems caused by monkey vaccine (8).

Another biological product that is obtained from animals is the Premarin brand of hormone replacement therapy. Premarin is short for pregnant mares' urine, which is exactly what it is. In North America, 75,000 mares are kept constantly pregnant. For the last 6 months of their 11 month pregnancies they are locked into narrow stalls without any exercise or anything to do. They have a tube hung around their genitals to catch all their urine. Their foals are sent to slaughter, and so are the mares once they are no longer good breeders.

It isn't necessary to use animals to get oestrogen -- it can easily be produced synthetically in the laboratory. Premarin condemns mares to unnecessary suffering.

Do animals suffer in experiments?

The harm caused to animals can take several forms:

• Pain and/or stress caused by the experiment itself.

• The fact that most animals are killed at the end of experiments because they are no longer needed.

• Frustration and boredom when cages in the animal house are poor.

Not all experiments cause pain or stress. For example, in feeding trials the aim is often to monitor the animals' growth rate with different diets. In experiments where animals are operated on, they are given an anaesthetic, and they are supposed to be given pain relief afterwards if necessary. However, product safety testing can cause great suffering when animals are poisoned or have their eyes or skin damaged by harmful chemicals. When a disease is deliberately produced in animals, they suffer at least as much as humans with this disease. In some cases they suffer more because of the way the disease is induced. For example, to damage the pancreas and produce a condition like diabetes, animals are given the drug streptozotocin. This makes them extremely sick, and pigs have been known to vomit for hours. To produce pain and inflammation, harmful chemicals are injected into the leg joints or foot pads of animals. This is an "animal model" for pain and arthritis research.

Animals also suffer in psychological experiments, especially when they involve human problems such as anxiety or depression. To produce "learned helplessness" in animals, which is supposed to be like depression in humans, they are given inescapable electric shocks to the feet. The animals become so traumatised as a result of being unable to escape this torment that they just give up.

Even when the experiment doesn't itself cause pain or stress, animals may suffer as a result of poor housing. One researcher has commented: " During the life of typical laboratory animals, fear, loneliness and boredom are more physically and mentally demanding than is pain" (10).

This statement is particularly true of rabbits-most of them are still kept in small and bare single cages. They can't exercise, they have no companionship, and they have nothing to do. They develop osteoporosis, with weak bones that break easily, as well as abnormal behaviour, such as chewing the metal bars of the cage over and over again. Some rats are still kept in bare wire cages, even though rats are active, sociable and intelligent animals.

Wouldn't medical research come to a standstill without animals?

No. There are many different approaches that can be used to study humans and human problems directly. The workings of internal organs such as the brain, and the development of diseases such as Parkinson's or Alzheimer's can be studied in living humans with MRI or PET scanners. Human tissues, including tumours removed during operations, can be used to test drugs. Human volunteers can be involved in experiments that don't cause harm, such as dietary or learning studies.

People who already have diseases can be monitored to learn more about the disease. One person with a birth defect has supported such research, saying: "... every person I know who is affected by birth defects, including me, is only to eager to help tease apart why something happens in some cases and not in others " (11). People with drug addictions could be asked to participate in studies, rather than making animals into alcoholics or cocaine addicts.

If they weren't allowed to use animals, researchers would make more use of alternative methods that already exist, and would soon develop exciting new ways of increasing medical knowledge that haven't even been thought of yet. For more details see Research without Animals and Dr Hadwen Trust for Humane Research and Without Animals .

Aren't animal experiments necessary to train doctors and vets?

No. In the UK medical students haven't been allowed to use animals to practise surgery since last century. The UK certainly doesn't produce inferior doctors as a result. Students learn anatomy and surgery by using donated bodies, then they observe skilled surgeons at work, and finally by begin to operate under supervision. There are models students can use to gain extra surgical practice, for example a model called PracticeRat. Placentas after birth can also be used to practice microsurgery.

Vets need to have contact with animals, but they don't need to kill animals. In some US vet schools, students have the option of learning in the same way as the UK surgeons. First they use models to learn basic skills, then they operate on animals who died of natural causes, then they operate under supervision on animals who need the surgery, for example, animals who need to be desexed. For more details, see Animals in tertiary teaching .

How would we know if products are safe without animal tests?

This question assumes that animal tests are reliable guides to product safety. This isn't the case. There can be big differences between species in how they respond to products. There can even be major differences between strains of the same species, so animal tests can't accurately predict the human response.

There have been many cases where drugs have been withdrawn from sale, or relabelled with more warnings, after causing injuries and even deaths in humans. These drugs passed animal tests, so the tests obviously don't guarantee safety.

There are now very good in vitro (test tube) tests to assess produce safety. Some of these tests use human cells. There are alternative tests to see if products cause skin or eye irritation, short-term toxicity, cancer or birth defects. For more details, see Cosmetic testing , Drug testing and Cancer and birth defects .

Don't researchers use alternatives to animals whenever possible?

No. This is certainly what the law requires, but in practice it doesn't happen. Researchers on the whole continue to use the methods they have used in the past. People who are experts at producing a particular disease in rats may know very little about setting up cell cultures to study this disease. They will continue to use rats, and are generally not keen to learn new methods. Ethics Committees do very little to encourage researchers to use other methods, even when alternatives are available. For more details about Ethics Committees and the law see Laboratory animals and the law .

Other Question and Answer documents you may wish to read can be found at:
American Anti-Vivisection Society
Animal Aid

References