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

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CATARACTS

ARSL PAGE 6

ARSL 2nd Edition Page 5

ARSL claims cataract surgery for human sufferers of cataract would be impossible without animal research.  This is incorrect.  The reader is asked to consider and assess the following medically proven facts:

The lead news in Wellington's Evening Post, March 3, and Dominion, March 5 1990, reported the many birth defects sweeping the north Wellington region.  During the first months of 1990 this news was broadcast constantly over local radio and television.  The abnormalities were spina bifida, cleft palate, club feet, Downs Syndrome and cataracts.  Photographs were published of babies born with cataracts (which causes opacity of the eye-lens leading to blurred vision and possible blindness).  Their parents, the Plunket nurses and the authorities were baffled and mystified, they all agreed it was uncanny.  National Health Statistics Centre's Dr Barry Borman investigating is reported to have said the abnormalities could be the result of environmental spraying.

On page 18 of The Poisoned Womb, John Elkington cites the evidence of Dr Peter Budetti, Director of the Health Policy Programme at the University of California, San Francisco, who stated:

"In the USA the number of babies born with physical or mental defects has doubled over the past twenty-five years."

Chapter 22 Living 25 Years Longer Than Our Great Grand Parents expounds substantially on the dire effects of chemicals on the human sperm, the fertility and health of embryos, foetuses and surviving children.

Elsewhere in this work is the evidence of Dr Herbert Stiller who says:

"Today, there is a genetic deficiency in every THIRD child."

Doctor Stiller reports on page 7 of his Animal Experimentation and Animal Experimenters, about the human eye as follows:

"It is certain that many medical substances suitable for use with human beings are not discovered at all if research is carried out through animal experiments.  Animal experimentation revealed in 1914 that amyl nitrate increases the inner pressure of the eye.  So for 50 years a valuable medicament in the treatment of certain eye diseases was ignored.  But in 1964 it was established that in human beings, in contrast to animals, the pressure of the eye is reduced by it..."

He then cites other examples of error and liability resulting from experiments on animals.  The reader is reminded of the example of asbestos in Chapter 1 Foreword of this book.

Dr Stiller, who is recognised as one of Europe's finest medical men, writes on page 31 of his previously mentioned book:

"In order to be critical of animal experimentation, one has no need of scientific expertise such as those concerned are so willing to demand."

The writer agrees, for the facts which legitimise criticism of animal experiments by lay-persons are freely available to all by way of the sixty-cent newspaper, for example:

A bold, lead article, on the front page of Great Britain's Western Daily Press, February 28 1992, reads:

"COVER-UP WARNING AS OZONE THREAT GROWS...

"There is fear", says European scientists, "that the ozone layer will break down completely over northern Europe in the next few weeks".  The article warns that if, or when, this happens, huge doses of ultra-violet radiation would reach the Earth's surface from the sun, heightening the chances of multitudes of people contracting skin cancer and cataracts.

It has also been widely publicised in the media that the chemical canthaxanthin, used in poultry-feed to enhance the colour of egg yolks "causes damage to the eyes" and livers of human beings.  Billions of egg-laying hens are dosed with canthaxanthin.  The British Government's Scientific Committee on Animal Nutrition reviewed the evidence but instead of withdrawing canthaxanthin from the birds' feed it asked for further evidence to be submitted to it in 1993.  The decision has been bitterly criticised by the Science Policy Research Unit at Sussex University which specialises in food additives.  Thus the experts which exposed the dangers involved in canthaxanthin additive now accuses the government as follows:

"The government is giving the benefit of the doubt to the industry rather than to the safety of the consumer."
(Advocates for Animals, Annual Pictorial Review, 1992, page 60.)

In New Zealand we have heard that before, when the New Zealand Government ignored in 1989 the warnings about chemical residues in food, resulting from the one-year investigation of environmental pollution conducted by Lincoln College and commissioned by the Ministry of the Environment.

On January 6 1992 the N.Z. Woman's Weekly cites the work of Dr George Duncan of the University of East Anglia who is using human eye tissue in cataract research.  He, and fellow researchers at Lister Hospital, claim that human tissue tests "give reassurance that experiments on animals do not".

Referring again to the dangers from pharmaceutical drugs tested on animals.  It is admitted in all the literature that Eraldin, in addition to killing people caused "severe eye damage".  And Ruesch, on page 74 of One Thousand Doctors (and many more) Against Vivisection, who attended the European Parliament at Strasbourg in 1982 with his valid case to abolish vivisection (at which he was given three minutes to address the meeting), writes that: A.D. Dayan, who represented the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries at this event, and who works for the Wellcome Research Laboratories, revealed:

"Practocol was prescribed for over four years before doctors realised it caused corneal damage including blindness... A side-effect not predicted by animal experiments."

For the surgical aspect there is no better referee than Lawson Tait, acknowledged and acclaimed in medical circles as the most authoritative surgeon of our times.

"The wounds of an animal behave so differently from those of man that the conclusions drawn from them by the vivisectors are completely valueless and have caused more damage than benefit."
(Lawson Tait, quoted in Prof. Croce's Vivisection or Science - a choice to make.)

In presenting the following cast-iron evidence rejecting ARSL's claims that animal experimentation is a necessary adjunct to cataract treatment and surgery, it must be repeated that the comments from leaders in the field are all sourced and substantiated:

• In the Journal of Organotherapy, Vol. XVI, No. 1, January-February 1932, page 23, it is reported that a well-known operation for cataract devised by Philip Syng Physick, was the result of clinical research alone.

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• In Medical Press, January 27 1954, page 74, in criticism of an article which drew attention to reports of successful treatment of cataract through experiments on rats, Posner warns that there are dangerous hazards, even resulting in blindness should the method be applied to human beings.

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TRACHOMA

• "Laboratory animals such as rabbits, guinea-pigs, cats and dogs cannot be infected in the conjunctiva.  Chimpanzees, Barbary apes and macaques have given different results to different observers."
  (F.H. Stewart, M.D., British Journal of Ophthalmology, Vol. 23, 1939, page 378.)

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• In a review of a book by Dr E.P. Fortin on the human retina, the British Medical Journal, October 26 1940, criticises Cajal's method of studying the retina and his conception of retinal structure because his studies were based largely on non-human eyes.

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KERATOMALACIA

• "Whereas there is much pathology in common between a rabbit and a child blinded by keratomalacia, the animal counterparts of the chronic degenerative diseases of man either do not exist or have little relation to human disease."
  (Lead article, Lancet, May 11 1957, page 977.)

In conclusion the author summarises and asks the reader to consider the result of this investigation which reveals the following:

Without citing a shred of medical evidence ARSL makes claims which are patently false.  Given that the medical and scientific facts prove the publishers of ARSL are wrong in their statements, not once but time and again, the reader is left to deliberate the identity of those who insist upon making such statements and their motive for doing so.  One fact is crystal clear, should those authors be put under the microscope on the dissection table, without exception the common denominator would be exposed as the quivering nerve of fear for the shattering losses they can expect when vivisection is abolished.

The producers of ARSL would have its readers believe they are philanthropists.  In reality they power the machine, which headed on the road to destruction, is lined with both human and animal casualties derived from producing, and animal-testing, chemicals and pharmaceuticals.  Drastic measures must be taken for a different way in medicine, a different way in food production, and an immediate halt to the production of substances that harm the environment and the people.

Nothing but chaos is to be achieved from continuing and setting up further vivisection programmes, for no cutting up of animals can produce health and well-being.  Conversely in all the areas cited it is producing ill-health and endangering the future of the people and the planet.

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