ANIMAL RESEARCH  T A K E S  LIVES
- Humans and Animals BOTH Suffer

contents | Chapter 8 index | index

CANCER

ARSL PAGES 1, 17

ARSL 2nd Edition Pages 1, 8, 9, 19

Readers should question the credentials of the publishers of ARSL who claim that the prevention and cure of cancer is to be found through vivisection.  An increasing amount of medical evidence and an overwhelming number of doctors and scientists are saying that vivisection causes cancer.  That the prevention of cancer means abolishing the products of vivisection.

Knowledge of cancer causation by chemicals originates from clinical observations, in 1775, of chimney sweeps.  According to the World Health Organisation at least 80%-90% of cancer deaths are due to environmental poisons, including industrial chemicals, factory emissions, nuclear power-plants, automobile exhaust, gas-powered engines, incinerators, plastics, diet, as well as to reproductive behaviour, and various elements of lifestyle and culture.  Carcinogenic material is now in the air we breathe, in the food we eat, the water we drink, the medicines we take, including X-rays, the list is endless.  It is said that with effort at least 50%-60% of carcinogens could be eliminated from our environment.

Environmental tragedies of every conceivable nature are now commonplace and occurring at a level never before in history.  Radio N.Z. News, January 26 1991, announced that on the ninth day of the war in the Middle East the deliberate spilling of oil into the sea as a military measure would cause pollution exceeding five times that of the Exxon Valdez disaster, as did the U.S.S.R. rocket fuel spill which killed over 100,000 seals and millions of cod, flatfish and starfish in the White Sea.  Does ARSL seriously expect us to believe that by cutting up animals the cancers let loose in these disasters can be prevented?  Almost on a daily basis toxic chemical spills are reported widely in the media.  At time of writing this article on January 3 1992 the N.Z. Herald headline article reads: "After-Effects of Chemical Spill Rip Town Apart".  Such reports are now so numerous one flicks the page without giving it a second thought.

"Unfortunately, we shall only learn the effect of thousands of chemical preparations on our health some time in the future, for they only emerge slowly in the course of time by accumulation."
(Dr John Higginson, Director of the Intl Office for Cancer Research, Corriere Della Sera, Milan, October 22 1974.)

"It has been estimated that as much as ninety percent of all human cancers are influenced by environmental hazards.  The way to stop useless and unnecessary animal experimentation is simply to make it unprofitable; eliminate the funding by the government agencies, or eliminate the agencies... money talks.  If the flow of the taxpayer dollars that supports the foolish and cruel and dangerous practices of official science is cut off, these practices will stop."
(Dr Irwin D. Bross, President of Biomedical Meta-Technology, Inc., U.S.A.)

Sir Arbuthnot Lane, Bart., C.B., M.B., M.S., F.R.C.S., speaking in the House of Commons:

"CANCER IS:

• By no means a mystery disease, the secrets of which can only be discovered by scientists, armed with microscopes, ultramicroscopes, test tubes, etc.  Unfortunately the researchers have obscured the causation of this commonplace malady by the investigation of countless relatively unimportant scientific details which they have discussed in papers and books, in language quite incomprehensible to the general public and to the great majority of medical men themselves...
   
• a disease of civilisation.  It is practically unknown to the primitive races leading primitive lives.  Hundreds of medical men who have practised for decades among the South African negroes have never seen a cancer case... On the other hand, cancer is not uncommon among the South African negroes in the coast towns who for decades have lived more or less on the white man's diet...
   
• essentially a nutritional disease.  It is far more prevalent in the towns where people subsist on artificial food than in the country where men eat fresh natural food, take plenty of exercise and are less troubled with intestinal stagnation and auto-intoxication than are the sedentary inhabitants of the larger cities.  We need not abolish civilisation in order to abolish cancer.  We need only reform our lives in accordance with the dictates of nature...
   
• a disease of faulty feeding, not a mysterious disease which can be fathomed only by eminent scientists who have specialised in microbiology, chemistry and other sciences...
   
• the result of chronic poisoning of the tissues of the body during decades...
   
• the cause of mortality increase by 50% during the last 15 years."

"Animals in Cancer Research: A Multi-Billion Dollar Fraud", is the title of an article written by Dr Irwin D. Bross reproduced in Fundamental and Applied Toxicology, November 6 1982.  It begins:

"The use of animals in cancer research has been attacked as unnecessary cruelty to animals, and defended as absolutely essential for research progress that will prevent or cure human cancer.  From a scientific standpoint, what is pertinent is that what are called 'animal model systems' in cancer research have been a total failure."

It concludes:

"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."

This article exposes that cancer research using animals is a highly profitable undertaking for certain medical schools and research institutes that are incapable of doing genuine cancer research - and that the use of animals is sustained by what Dr Bross says is a "superstitious belief in a grossly unscientific notion that mice are miniature men".

"For years I have carefully studied the annual reports of the Ministry of Health, the Medical Research Council and the two cancer research bodies, but I have been unable to discover what benefits they have conferred on the community, although I must confess I have often admired their easy flowing rhetoric and their naive assumption of the value of their own efforts and as essays in subtle propaganda for the extraction of yet more money out of the generous and credulous British public."
(W. Mitchell Stevens, Britain, M.D., F.R.C.P., Medical World, July 5 1940, page 465.)

"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."
(Dr J. F. Brailsford, M.D., Ph.D., Birmingham Evening Dispatch, January 10 1956.)

The following is taken from the "Houston-Null Analysis" in New York's paper Our Town, September 3 1978:

"A solution to cancer would mean the termination of research programmes, the obsolescence of skills, the end of dreams of personal glory.  Triumph over cancer would dry up contributions to self-perpetuating charities.  It would mortally threaten the present clinical establishment by rendering obsolete the expensive surgical, radiological and chemotherapeutic treatments in which so much money, training and equipment is invested.  The new therapy must be disbelieved, denied, discouraged and disallowed at all costs, regardless of actual testing results and preferably without any testing at all."

BREAST CANCER

1. DRUGS
   

   "My effort to head off the poisoning of hundreds of women with breast cancer with a dangerous drug (Breast cancer drug 5FU) that could destroy their host defence systems failed.  The National Cancer Institute went right ahead.  Not a few women with breast cancer have paid with their lives for this stupidity."
   (Dr Irwin D. Bross, Experimental and Applied Toxicology, Jan/Feb 1983.)

   ---

   The U.S. National Cancer Institute, in the New York Times, December 23 1986, admitted that "the live mouse screen is just not producing action against the major tumours".  This coincides with Dr Bross's statement who writes in Animals in Cancer Research: A Multi-Billion Dollar Fraud:

   "Although there are hundreds of different animal model systems used in cancer research involving many different animals and many different transplanted or induced tumours from the same or different species, there is no animal model system that comes anywhere close to being a model of the human cancer process.  It does no good to put human cells in animal systems or to use primates as hosts.  The biochemical environment of the model is completely different from that of the human host.  The animal model systems are merely a bad analogy and reasoning from a bad analogy is fallacious in logic and in science."

2. MAMMOGRAM
   The much touted mammogram does not prevent cancer, merely finds it, but overwhelming medical evidence exists that X-rays actually cause cancer.  This is now acknowledged by the medical profession.  Refer to an article titled "X-ray Tests Linked as Cause of Breast Cancer", Evening Post, December 27 1991.  (Also note on Dr Bross earlier in this article.)

3. DIET
   In 1982 the U.S. National Research Council published a report titled "Diet, Nutrition and Cancer" which shows the evidence that dietary factors cause cancer of the breast and other organs.  In an article in the September/October 1991 issue of the journal of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine the Committee criticises that:

   "Brochures with watered-down recommendations have sat collecting dust at cancer research centres.  There was never an organised effort to give women the information they need to make decisions about cancer prevention."

   This four-page article, complete with graphs, gives life-saving information on how women can take responsibility for their own health by preventing cancer through diet.  There is no mention of the necessity of vivisecting animals, which ARSL would fraudulently have us believe is necessary!  Brief extracts of the article are as follows:

   • "The dietary factors emerged (from the above report) in comparisons of different countries.  In Japan, for example, breast cancer is rare.  But Japanese women who move to the United States soon have the same risk of cancer as American women - at least 400 percent higher than in Japan."
      
   • "The critical factor is the amount of fat, particularly animal fat, in the diet.  The more fat women consume, the greater their cancer risk."
      
   • "Similar findings have been made within countries.  Vegetarians for example, have much less cancer risk than non-vegetarians.  When the link between fat and cancer was found, researchers found that the more estrogen there is, the greater the driving force behind some kinds of cancer.  The principal estrogen is estradiol, and the amount of estradiol produced by the body is linked to the amount of fat in the diet.  Vegans (people who consume no animal products) have significantly lower estrogen levels than non-vegetarians, perhaps because of the lower fat content of the vegan diet."

   PCRM claim that a cancer-prevention diet has to be very different from even the diet recommended by the National Cancer Institute which recommends a 30 percent fat diet.  They cite further studies which have discovered that to prevent cancer, fat intake must be reduced to the extremely low levels found in China, Japan, and other countries which enjoy low cancer rates.  Cancer prevention, they say, should contain no more than 15 percent fat and should be vegetarian.

   With this new knowledge, which PCRM says is "powerful artillery in the war against cancer... as much as 80 percent of cancers can potentially be stopped before they even start".

   "As the consumption of meat, dairy products, and fried foods has become a daily routine, the female body has been assaulted by altered hormonal function, an unnatural age of puberty, and a much greater risk of cancer.  By eliminating unhealthful dietary factors and encouraging the diets that diminish risk, we can hope to turn the tide on this epidemic."

ARSL VERSUS THE VIVISECTORS

JOHN BAILER

Twenty years on the staff of the National Cancer Institute and editor of its journal.  Recipient in July 1990 of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, one of the few scientists so chosen says:

"My overall assessment is that the national cancer programme must be judged a qualified failure."
(Speaking at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in May 1985.)

• "I am no longer convinced that there are wonderful cancer cures out there waiting to be found.  I do not think that we should base public policy on an assumption that if we just try hard enough, we will find them."
   
• "If we are to effectively prevent cancer, we will have to change our lives.  We'll have to change our diets and certainly change our smoking habits.  We're going to have to clean up our environment, change industrial processes, and do any number of things that will be difficult, expensive time-consuming and intrusive."
   
• "We have poured vast amounts of money into the search for cancer cures over a very long period of time.  We've brought some of the world's best research minds to bear on these problems.  We've given it our best shot.  It's time to admit it hasn't worked and start down another track."
   
• "There was a trial in Sweden for which a report was published several years ago.  In it there was a table that showed that women under fifty who had had mammograms actually had more deaths from breast cancer than a matched control group."
   
• "A change at the National Cancer Institute of the kind I am describing... would mean a massive disruption in ideas, in momentum, in the research community, and IN THE BUSINESSES THAT SUPPORT THAT RESEARCH COMMUNITY."
  (Author's emphasis.)

These were Dr Bailer's answers to questions put by Neal D. Barnard, M.D. of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, U.S.A. and published in PCRM Update, September/October 1990.  (Kindly supplied to the Author by K. and M. Ungar, U.S.A.)

"The five year cancer survival statistics of the American Cancer Society are very misleading.  They now count things that are not cancer, and, because we are able to diagnose at an earlier stage of the disease, patients falsely appear to live longer.  Our whole cancer research in the past 20 years has been a failure.  More people over 30 are dying from cancer than ever before... More women with mild or benign diseases are being included in statistics and reported as being 'cured'.  When government officials point to survival figures and say they are winning the war against cancer they are using those survival rates improperly."
(Dr J. Bailer, New England Journal of Medicine.)

DAVID KORN

Chairman of the National Cancer Institute's (sometimes known as the National Mouse Institute) Advisory Board says:

"For 35 years U.S. scientists labouring in the National Cancer Institute's screening programme have injected more than 400,000 chemicals into leukemic mice, hoping to find chemotherapies that would help solve the riddles of cancer... We've been using the wrong system as the screening device."

"The new system which is being employed at the Development Therapeutics Programme in Frederick, Maryland, uses an arsenal of automated devices and computers to test potential cancer-fighting drugs on real human cancer cells grown in laboratories rather than on mice.  This enables scientists to test more than 300 chemicals a week.  Many of these drugs had failed in the past when tested on mice."
("Giving up on the Mice.  Scientists Searching for Cancer-cures Try a New Tactic", Time Magazine, September 17 1990.)

DR BRUCE AMES

Director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley, and...

DR LOIS SWIRSKY GOLD

Director of the Carcinogenicity Potency Database Project at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, and...

DR BERNARD D. GOLDSTEIN

Chairman of the National Academy of Sciences say:

"A growing number of scientists are questioning the usefulness of the animal tests used to decide whether chemicals cause cancer."

"Researchers have criticised the tests for years, there is now more of a scientific basis for their complaints."
(Dr Goldstein.)

Ames and Gold explain that animal tests look for cancer by giving rodents enormous doses of suspect chemicals.  But say:

"At these high doses, many chemicals cause excessive cell division because, quite often, they kill cells or chronically irritate tender tissues, leading other cells to start dividing to replace ones that are lost.  Cells that are dividing are much more likely to experience cancer-causing changes."
("Skepticism About Cancer Tests on Animals Growing", Daily News, Bur Val, California, U.S.A. , thanks K. and M. Ungar.)

N.B.: Dr Bruce Ames, a cancer expert from the University of California (Berkeley) and a member of the President's National Cancer Advisory Board, will be remembered in medical history for the discovery, for which he rose to fame in 1973, of a non-animal, bacteria-based test which is reliable, quick and cheap.  Widely acknowledged "The Ames Test" can be completed in approximately two to seven days, at a cost of $100 to $250 per substance tested.  Animal tests take an average of two to four years, at a cost of $200,000 or $400,000 per substance tested.¹
(B.N. Ames, "Principles and methods for their detection", Chemical Mutagens, Vol. 1, 1971, pages 261-282; B.N. Ames, W.E. Durstan, E. Yamasaki, F.D. Lee, Carcinogens are Mutagens.  A Simple Non-animal Test System, 1973.)

Prof. Croce, in Vivisection or Science - A Choice to Make, says of the Ames test:

"It has many advantages such as speed, simplicity, low cost, ability to test many substances simultaneously and to produce standardised results regardless of the location of the laboratory."

Given this information anti-vivisectionists everywhere, but especially in New Zealand where alliances such as the publishers of ARSL are using public money to promote them, should be questioning their governments, WHY ANIMAL TESTS ARE STILL BEING CARRIED OUT?

In addition to questioning the credentials of ARSL's publishers we should be examining, in face of all the scientific opposition to vivisection, ARSL's insistence on maintaining it.  The reader is directed to NZAVS Submission in Support of NZAVS Petition to Abolish Vivisection (1989), pages 15, 16 and 17, which touch on the solid gold business of cancer and how more people make their money from cancer than die of it.  It also lists numerous scientists and their evidence who strongly reject the validity of animals in the search for cancer "cures".

(Considerable evidence about man-made cancers and doctors' opposition to the use of animals on the grounds of invalidity is in Chapter 22 Living 25 Years Longer Than Our Great Grand Parents.)

• "Up to 10% of childhood cancers are caused by radiological examination during pregnancy."
  (Prof. R. Doll, Nature, Vol. 265, 1977, page 589.)

---

• "My studies have proven conclusively that untreated cancer victims actually live up to four times longer than treated individuals."
  (Hardin Jones, Professor of Medical Physics and Physiology, University of California, Speaking in 1975, quoted in the Journal of the American Anti-Vivisection Society.)

---

• "The man in the street has unfortunately been sold the idea that the breakthrough cure for cancer is just around the corner... The very prospect of effective treatment seems so remote that it doesn't even enter into the speculative day-to-day conversation of people engaged in cancer research... New treatments have not produced any detectable decline in the total annual cancer mortality, even for children."
  (John Cairns, Director of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund's Mill Hill Laboratory, Cancer, Science and Society, 1978.)

---

• "From a comparison of the results of the present study with those of other studies, one can draw the following conclusions: compounds that cause hepatomas (liver cancers) in mice, may not always be carcinogenic in rats, or if carcinogenic in both species, the compounds may have different primary target sites.  The extrapolation of such results to define any risk to humans remains a troublesome problem."
  (Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Vol. 67.)

---

• "The ultimate dilemma with any animal model of human disease is that it can never reflect the human situation with complete accuracy."
  (D.J. Galloway, Animal Researcher, Glasgow's Western Infirmary, Cancer Surveys, Vol. 8, 1989, pages 169-188.)

---

• "Experimentation on animals undermines the very foundations of practical medicine."
  (Dr J. Burton, Medical World, May 18 1945.)

Refer also to Chapter 7 Development of New Drugs.

D
Animal Defense & Anti-Vivisection Soc., Vancouver, BC
(Civil Abolitionist, Vol. IV, No. 2, Spring 1992, page 5.)

Footnote
1. An example of the value of the Ames Test, when it was used on the cancer-causing fire-retardant, TRIS, which affected 45 million children's sleepwear is given in Chapter 22 Living 25 Years Longer Than Our Great Grand Parents.

<< previous page | next page >>

contents | Chapter 8 index | index

Description of Graphic

The cartoon depicts a cat, rabbit and mouse, bandaged up after having been vivisected, exiting a "cancer research foundation" building.  They are speaking to a man holding a bucket full of dollar bills and a woman with a purse stuffed full of dollars.  The caption reads "Cure?  Well no... but they have discovered 700 ways to give it to us...".
Back to cartoon.