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Home > Archive > UK gardening > February 2008 > Animal Testing: an Historic Breakthrough
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Animal Testing: an Historic Breakthrough
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| Old Codger 2008-02-18, 9:25 am |
| Animal Testing: an Historic Breakthrough
Posted 15 February 2008
http://tinyurl.com/26hyyw
Key US government agencies this week have issued the clearest and most
authoritative statement to date that animal testing does not work.
Under a five-year programme, government laboratories will start moving
to non-animal methods such as the use of cells and computer models to
test chemicals, drugs and toxins for safety. Such methods are faster,
and are likely to be more accurate and far less expensive, officials
of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Environmental
Protection Agency told a major science conference in Boston. The goal
is to eliminate live animal use in toxicity tests in ten years.
Details of the programme have also been published in the journal,
Science.
The development will resonate around the world, not least in Europe
where thousands of chemicals are to be subjected to safety testing
under the EU programme, known as REACH. Current REACH plans call for
millions of animals to be killed. The US announcement will give fresh
ammunition to proponents of non-animal methods.
Animal testing has been standard practice for evaluating the safety of
chemicals and drugs. But National Human Genome Research Institute
(NHGRI) director Dr. Francis Collins told reporters covering the
American Association for the Advancement of Science conference that it
does not predict very well what a chemical will do to a human being.
‘It's slow. It's expensive,’ Collins said. ‘We are not rats and we are
not even other primates … After all, ultimately what you are looking
for is, does this compound do damage to cells? Can we, instead of
looking at a whole animal, look at cells from different organs?’
The NIH has been carrying out tests using high-speed robots that can
screen 200,000 compounds in two days. It would take a researcher using
traditional whole-animal tests 12 years working eight hours per day
and seven days a week to do the same amount of work.
Dr Christopher Austin, an NIH Director, added: ‘Traditional animal
testing is expensive, time-consuming, uses a lot of animals and from a
scientific perspective the results do not necessarily translate to
humans.’
The announcement of the five-year development programme represents an
historic breakthrough. It serves as a vindication of the years of
campaigning by anti vivisection groups, which have always supported
their ethical objection to vivisection by producing evidence that such
tests are unreliable and that far better non-animal methods are
available and should be embraced.
Despite this week’s important announcement, there remains a puzzling
commitment to using cells obtained from animals, rather than from
people, as a source material to establish safety data. The argument
will, therefore, continue to be made that the use of live animals or
their tissues, is not only unethical but unscientific.
Says Animal Aid Director, Andrew Tyler:
‘This week's announcement marks the beginning of the end of animal
testing. The agencies involved are enormously influential within the
global scientific community; where they have led, Britain and Europe
will follow. The sooner they do so the better. While non-animal
methods are cheaper, faster and more reliable they do require an
initial capital investment. Given that such tests are a matter of
public health and many are compulsory under law, the British
government must act now by providing the necessary resources and the
political lead for the development of non-animal safety testing. The
choice now is to adhere to defunct practices or to embrace a positive
future. This is a question of life and death – for animals and for
people.’
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| Old Codger 2008-02-18, 1:25 pm |
| Old Codger wrote:
Not a word. Pete the troll is performing the old 'forge headers and
copy and paste garbage' trick again.
> Animal Testing: an Historic Breakthrough
> Posted 15 February 2008
As Pete never reads what he posts and desires only to provoke
argument it is safest to assume that anything he espouses is
at least unsafe and probably malicious.
--
Old Codger
e-mail use reply to field
What matters in politics is not what happens, but what you can make
people believe has happened. [Janet Daley 27/8/2003]
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| Old Codger 2008-02-18, 1:25 pm |
| Old Codger wrote:
No. Pete the troll is playing wannabe master forger again.
> Animal Testing: an Historic Breakthrough
As Pete never reads what he posts and desires only to provoke
argument it is safest to assume that anything he espouses is
at least unsafe and probably malicious.
--
Old Codger
e-mail use reply to field
What matters in politics is not what happens, but what you can make
people believe has happened. [Janet Daley 27/8/2003]
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