Animal testing useful?

[xman]

As the history of vaccine research in the HIV field demonstrated many candidates succeeded in animal tests but failed completely in human trials. A perfect example is the Merck Vaccine and many other promising compounds. This proves that immunlogical responses in primates and other animals are different than in humans. In my opinion animal testing can help us understanding how an organism reacts to chemicals but is limited in proving the efficacy of a compound in the human body. The final results in most cases are totally different than in the animal testing phase and trials on humans fails. Wouldn't it be better to test directly on human cell cultures to see the results? Since animal testing proves to be time consuming, in most cases useless and finally also unethical, more advanced methods in proving the efficacy of a vaccine or drug should be established.

[freewillie99]

in most cases useless and finally also unethical

hilarious.  animals have no rights.  go ahead and lick that frog.

[physicsguy]

I think we should try to keep animal testing to a minimum and only use it when there's a good case to be made for it.  Researching SIV in chimps to get a better grasp on HIV in humans makes sense to me.

Cell cultures are simply one component of a thorough study.  If in vivo drug performance really lined up with in vitro efficacy, we'd have cured HIV a decade ago. Use in vivo tests to determine efficacy, animal trials to get some assurance that it's safe, then try it out in humans.  Anything else is just going to end up killing people.

[veritas]

physicsguy,

BRAVO----- Intelligent post !!

v

[RapidRod]

Animal reseach is very necessary in medical research. Had it not been for the use of animals in research we wouldn't see most of the procedures that are being used today.

[xman]

Animal reseach is very necessary in medical research. Had it not been for the use of animals in research we wouldn't see most of the procedures that are being used today.

sure but if it really works a vaccine for hiv would be ready since we can prevent infection in primates but not in humans

[Inchlingblue]

I think we should try to keep animal testing to a minimum and only use it when there's a good case to be made for it.  Researching SIV in chimps to get a better grasp on HIV in humans makes sense to me.

This is what the scientist who did the study recently that found chimps do die from SIV had to say (I agree with her):

Hahn does not believe studies should extend to reversing the movement to stop invasive research on chimpanzees. "They think and have societies," she said. "Rather than shooting them up with SIV, one should be more creative and find ways and means of answering the question without doing harm to chimpanzees."

LINK:

http://www.thebody.com/content/confs/ias2009/art52883.html

[noratmedicine]

AIDS. from dr ray greek http://www.navs.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=7753 also see www.curedisease.net

"According to the February 20, 2009 issue of Science:

SIVcpz, the chimpanzee virus that infected humans and triggered the AIDS epidemic, caused no harm to apes. But new data reveal that wild chimps infected with SIVcpz are more likely to die than are uninfected chimps . . . Captive chimps experimentally infected with HIV-1 typically suffer no harm, which led several researchers to propose that chimps had lived with SIVcpz for centuries and that their immune systems had evolved to coexist with the virus. But few SIVcpz- infected chimps in the wild were identified until about a decade ago . . .

We hear all the time about a new breakthrough using animals. What often goes unreported in the news is that a vast majority of these fail to translate to humans. Since HIV was isolated researchers have been experimenting with nonhuman primates seeking a vaccine or cure. Neither have been found; for humans. Many vaccines and preventive measures have been found for monkeys. Yet the NIH continues to fund experiments on a different species suffering from a different virus.

Animals are not going to be predictive for humans because:

1.
animals and humans have different genes;
2.
animals and humans control and express the same genes differently;
3.
animals and humans live in different external environments (notice that wild chimpanzees are apparently susceptible to SIVcpz while captive chimps were not);
4.
animals and humans live in different internal environments (even if we all had the same gene, how all those genes and proteins interact would be different);
5.
even if animals and humans suffered from exactly the same virus in exactly the same fashion it does not follow they will respond similarly to the same treatment because different biochemical pathways may be involved.

The above differences highlight why monkeys are no better predictors for humans than are our more distant relatives, mice. A percentage of genetic similarity does not imply predictive ability...."

yes monkeys dont get aids so no point experimenting on them, same for all other human disease and all animal experiments. humans and animals only get the same diseases 1.16% of the time.

DRUGS
"92% of new drugs fail in clinical trials, after they have passed all the safety tests in animals" US FDA (2004) "Innovation or Stagnation, Challenge and Opportunity on the Critical Path to new Medical Products" (36).

"A drug that is tested in animals will have a completely different effect in man. There are uncounted examples that could be cited." (Dr. med. Karlheinz Blank) Lord Platt, President of the Royal College of Physicians said "No amount of animal testing can make a drug safe because humans react differently from animals." The report of the british pharmaceutical industries expert committee on drug toxicity said "Information from one animal species cannot be taken as valid for any other. It is not a matter of balancing the cruelty and suffering of animals against the gain of humanity spared from the suffering, because that is not the choice. Animals die to enable hundreds of new drugs to be marketed annually, but the gain is to industry, not mankind." Dr Herbert Gundersheimer, "Results from animal tests are not transferable between species, and therefore cannot guarantee product safety for humans…In reality these tests do not provide protection for consumers from unsafe products, but rather are used to protect corporations from legal liability." Report of the Medical Research Council "It must be emphasized that it is impossible to extrapolate quantitatively from one species to any other species." The Lancet, "We know from drug toxicity studies that animals are very imperfect indicators of human toxicity: only clinical experience and careful control of the introduction of new drugs can tell us about their real dangers." Dr Ralph Heywood, former scientific director of huntington life sciences, one of the largest contract research laboratories in the world speaking to the CIBA Foundation said "The best guess for the correlation of adverse toxic reactions between human and animal data is somewhere between 5% and 25%" and "90% of our work is done for legal and not for scientific reasons."
So the USFDA, from drug co's own data on millions of animals over decades indicates that animals are incorrect in determining drug toxicity for humans 92% of the time. It is a legal device, not a scientific one.

Microdosing Pharmagene of Asterand are making genetically engineered drugs made for individuals as drug effects vary between humans

CANCER from Campaign Against Fraudulent Medical Research www.pnc.com.au/~cafmr

"Everyone should know that most cancer research is largely a fraud and that the major cancer research organisations are derelict in their duties to the people who support them." - Linus Pauling PhD (Two-time Nobel Prize winner). Dr A. Sabin, creator of the vaccine of his name said, "It is time to end cancer research on animals because it is not related to humans." And Dr Irwin Bross in Fundamental and Applied Toxicology "The moral is that animal model systems not only kill animals they also kill humans. There is no good factual evidence to show that the use of animals in cancer research has led to the prevention or cure of a single human cancer." And Dr J F Brailsford "During the past fifty years scientists experimenting with thousands of animals have found 700 ways of causing cancer. But they had not discovered one way of curing the disease."


Have you ever wondered why, despite the billions of dollars spent on cancer research over many decades, and the constant promise of a cure which is forever "just around the corner", cancer continues to increase?
Cancer Is Increasing

Once quite rare, cancer is now the second major cause of death in Western countries such as Australia, the U.S.A. and the United Kingdom. In the early 1940s cancer accounted for 12% of Australian deaths. (1)ref # d'Espaignet, E.T. et al., Trends in Australian Mortality 1921-1988, Australian Government Publishing Service (AGPS), Canberra, 1991, p. 33

By 1992 this figure had climbed to 25.9% of Australian deaths. (2)ref # Australian Bureau of Statistics, Causes of Death, Australia 1992, ABS, Canberra, 1993, p.1

and from safer med. campaign,
Given substances are not necessarily carcinogenic to all species. Studies show that 46% of chemicals found to be carcinogenic in rats were not carcinogenic in mice. [23] If species as closely related as mice to rats do not even contract cancer similarly, it's not surprising that 19 out of 20 compounds that are safe for humans caused cancer in animals. [24]


The US National Cancer Institute treated mice growing 48 different "human" cancers with a dozen different drugs proven successful in humans, and in 30 of the cases, the drugs were useless in mice. Almost two-thirds of the mouse models were wrong. Animal experimentation is not scientific because it is not predictive.

The US National Cancer Institute also undertook a 25 year screening programme, testing 40,000 plant species on animals for anti-tumour activity. Out of the outrageously expensive research, many positive results surfaced in animal models, but not a single benefit emerged for humans. As a result, the NCI now uses human cancer cells for cytotoxic screening.[25]

Dr. Richard Klausner, as director of the US National Cancer Institute, plainly states:

"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."
refs 23# DiCarlo DrugMet Rev,15; p409-131984.
24# Mutagenesis1987;2:73-78.
25# Handbook of Laboratory Animal Science, Volume II Animal Models Svendensen and Hau (Eds.) CRC Press 1994 p4.

 animal tests do not identify human carcionogens, even warnings on cigarette packets were delayed for 10 years due to animal 'tests' and 180 years for arsenic, also asbestos, literally thousands of human carcinogens. legal not scientific

 
 

[Boze]

Forget chimps - we should use brain-dead people. On a donor form there should be an option - in case of brain death, use the body to study diseases. Maybe pop a few organs that are useful but non critical for research - eyes and what not.

[jkinatl2]

Just unbelievable.

[Matty the Damned]

Forget chimps - we should use brain-dead people. On a donor form there should be an option - in case of brain death, use the body to study diseases. Maybe pop a few organs that are useful but non critical for research - eyes and what not.

Borzel,

You have some seriously fucked up ethics.

MtD

[Boze]

MtD,

how is this different from organ donation?

[WillyWump]

hilarious.  animals have no rights.  go ahead and lick that frog.

Thats Awesome!

[Moffie65]

I guess most of you in this thread have little or no knowledge of the HIV research that has preceeded your lame postulations. 

I can't tell you the number of friends I have had, who went to their graves with human drug studies that have given us a HAART that is not only effective, but insures all of you have a chance at a real life.  Add to that, the number of friends I have who have not only performed testing on animals in the early days, but also are still here because of much of this testing. 

I am totally apalled at the comments of Borzel here, and I also assume that this poster has absolutely NO moral compass. 

You all need to spend some time studying the personal impact of research in this disease, and all the people who gave their lives so you could argue this infantile arguement. 

I am totally amazed that this thread even exists at all on this site.  Dumber than stupid!!

[Boze]

To alll the self-righteous dead people defenders, this is all I will say:

http://www.megavideo.com/?v=1A1WRUJD

start at 05:40

[Moffie65]

Borzel, go ahead and write what you are going to say.  Links are just as lazy and poor an arguement as not even having a soul. 

[Boze]

It's a video quote from Seinfeld first episode. Looking it up and finding the spot in the episode that conveyed my point took a considerable amount of effort. Least one could do is watch it.

[RapidRod]

Not worth a reply.

[Hellraiser]

I think we could use children to test potential HIV cures.  I mean at the end of the day we really haven't got much invested in them yet...you with me on this borzel?

[Boze]

Of course, children and brain-dead are exactly the same thing

Ya'll understand what brain-dead means? Here:

Brain death is a legal indicator of death in the USA that refers to the irreversible end of all brain activity (including involuntary activity necessary to sustain life) due to total necrosis of the cerebral neurons following loss of blood flow and oxygenation. Brain-stem death (not whole brain death) is taken to be the significant indicator of death. The significant point is that the brain is no longer capable of sustaining the rest of the body's systems without advanced life support. It should not be confused with a persistent vegetative state. The concept of brain death emerged in the 1960s, as the ability to resuscitate individuals and mechanically keep the heart and lungs functioning became prevalent.

[Assurbanipal]

Of course, children and brain-dead are exactly the same thing

Ya'll understand what brain-dead means? Here:

Brain death is a legal indicator of death in the USA that refers to the irreversible end of all brain activity (including involuntary activity necessary to sustain life) due to total necrosis of the cerebral neurons following loss of blood flow and oxygenation. Brain-stem death (not whole brain death) is taken to be the significant indicator of death. The significant point is that the brain is no longer capable of sustaining the rest of the body's systems without advanced life support. It should not be confused with a persistent vegetative state. The concept of brain death emerged in the 1960s, as the ability to resuscitate individuals and mechanically keep the heart and lungs functioning became prevalent.

Borzel

If your parents got into a horrible car accident and were brain dead in the hospital would you authorize the doctors to keep their bodies alive and experiment on them? For how many months?

A

[Boze]

Assur,

That's a reasonable point. Others just said 'yuck' which made discussing the issue hard

I think that the choice should be up to the individual. I personally would wish to completely donate my body to science. People should not have to decide that for their loved ones. All I ask is for a checkmark on the donor card for that.

I guess it has to do with how one perceives the whole body-soul dynamic. I just think that those who want to help science (after their brains are dead) should have that option.

[Hellraiser]

Oh I know the difference between children and braindead people.  I was just being overly sarcastic.

[GNYC09]

I think we could use children to test potential HIV cures.  I mean at the end of the day we really haven't got much invested in them yet...you with me on this borzel?

That reminds me of a quote I recently read, "The children are our future, and they must be stopped" 

[Jeff G]

I'm horrified by this whole topic . Who is gonna volunteer to fuck these brain dead people and give them aids to experiment on anyway . I certainly will not .

[Hellraiser]

I'm horrified by this whole topic . Who is gonna volunteer to fuck these brain dead people and give them aids to experiment on anyway . I certainly will not .

oh don't play innocent, like you haven't fucked someone who you were fairly certain had to be clinically brain dead anyway.

[Jeff G]

oh don't play innocent, like you haven't fucked someone who you were fairly certain had to be clinically brain dead anyway.

I would answer you but I'm totally exhausted from typing and sharing my deep thought of the day .

[Boze]

jg, do you think that scientists fuck monkeys to infect them with SIV?

[Andy Velez]

Dear All,

For the timebeing I am going to leave this thread open even though I am wondering what good purpose it serves.

In the meantime, lay off of the snarky retorts to each other guys. If there isn't any legit conversation to have here then just let the thread dwindle and die off.

Thanks for your cooperation.