Are Experiments on Animals Effective in Drugs’ Manufacturing?
Experiments on animals are necessary in order to ensure the safety of products, cosmetics, and household chemicals. They are also used to develop new methods of testing new medical substances for different diseases’ treatment. In fact, experiments on animals are completely unsuitable for these purposes. They do not allow assessing whether the use of certain substances by humans will bring any benefits. Daily, more and more scientists, politicians and ordinary citizens are realizing that such experiments cannot confirm the safety and effectiveness of tested substances on humans.
The staff of Secure Tabs has conducted private research on how this situation looks like nowadays. Every day, breaking news claims that science cannot do without experiments on animals because a “single organism” is required to develop new methods of treatment and new medications.
Indeed, the animal belongs to a single organism. But such an organism is absolutely not suitable for studying the approaches chosen by scientists. The anatomy, physiology, biochemical processes of animals and humans are significantly different. Even animals of the same class, but of different species, can sometimes react very differently to the same chemical substance or drug. Moreover, experiments on animals don’t confirm how a person will respond to the tested product.
Many drugs, which were considered safe on the basis of experiments on animals, caused severe side effects and complications in people. Sometimes these complications can be even fatal. This is another evidence of the unreliability of experiments on animals.
Our specialists have not found any confirmation on how many useful and effective drugs have never been released because they were rejected in the experimental phase during animal testing. If aspirin, ibuprofen, insulin, penicillin, and phenobarbital had been tested on animals, these irreplaceable drugs would never have been approved for production and sale.
When developing each new drug, tens of thousands of animals suffer and die. In most cases, a “new” drug is just an analog of an already known and produced substance.
Animal experiments do not make any significant contribution to the creation of new drugs. The pharmaceutical industry uses them only in favor to get much profit.
Animal experiments – non-scientific method anymore
Most human diseases do not occur in animals, so their symptoms are artificially provoked in animals.” For example, to get a similarity of Parkinson’s disease on an animal (monkeys, mice, rats), a toxin that destroys nerve cells is injected into the brain. Cancers are caused either by manipulations in the animal’s genome or by direct injection of cancer cells into mice. Scientists are trying to reproduce a stroke by blocking the arteries of the mice’s brain using a special catheter. Myocardial infarction is caused in dogs by ligation of the coronary vessels.
Although all these artificially provoked diseases have features similar to symptoms in humans, they demonstrate a completely different etiology and pathophysiology (causes and course of pathological processes). Such important factors of morbidity as nutrition, lifestyle, bad habits, ecology, environmental impact, stress, psychological and social factors are not taken into account.
Thus, the results of studies on animals are unreliable. This is confirmed by many facts. For example, 92% of developed drugs fail in clinical trials due to their severe side effects or lack of effectiveness, although in animal experiments the effectiveness and safety of these drugs have been “proven”. Half of the remaining 8% of successfully completed clinical trials are discontinued due to severe side effects and/or deaths.
The mass media regularly announces the breakthrough approach to the treatment of a wide variety of diseases. These are clinically successful treatment options for Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, cancer, atherosclerosis, etc. But new “miracle” methods turn out to be ineffective in attempts to apply them in humans and remain effective only on paper.
Recently, more and more scientific studies have appeared that question the benefits and necessity of experiments on animals. These studies confirm the inconsistency of the results of such experiments. It makes the results of experiments on animals completely unreliable and dangerous for clinical use in medicine.
The work on comparing the effectiveness of treatment methods for experimental animals and humans has been published in a scientific journal in the UK. Only 3 out of 6 cases proved a correspondence between the data on animals and humans. Animal experiments are not only meaningless. They are also dangerous. They inhibit scientific progress due to their false and unreliable results.
Animal-free research methods are possible
The discontinuation of experiments on animals does not at all mean the end of science and scientific progress in medicine. It implies quite the opposite: placing a person in a center of interest can contribute to a breakthrough in medicine. Alternative research methods without the use of animals, “in-vitro” methods on human cell cultures, computer modeling are capable to give reliable outcomes.
Computer models are able to provide complete information about the structure, mechanism of action and toxicity of various substances (both drugs and chemicals). As a result of the computer simulation and in-vitro methods combination, the so-called microchips appeared. They represent a system of miniature channels and chambers lined with cells of various human organs. Such microchips allow studying the metabolism of drugs, their effect on individual organs and the possibility of the toxic decomposition products’ appearance.
Watch the video that underlines what experiments on animals may result in: