ANIMAL RESEARCH T A K E S LIVES
- Humans and Animals BOTH Suffer
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Cystic fibrosis, a disease of the pancreas, is a genetic disorder which mostly affects newborns. We should be asking why, as ARSL states, one in 400 New Zealand babies are being born with this crippling disease. Similarly we should be asking why are one in 25 healthy Jews now carriers of the dreaded Tay-Sachs disease which strikes babies at six months of age and kills them at age three to four. And why there is a one in four chance that each carrier of Tay-Sachs disease will result in an affected child - and why an alarming number of Carribean babies are now being born with sickle-cell anemia?
The Dominion, February 19 1991, ran an article "Health Authorities Debate High Cost of High-Tech Care" in which the highly intensive and extended treatment of a 25 year old woman suffering from cystic fibrosis was criticised "as health budgets buckle under increasing demands". A rough estimate put the cost of keeping this patient in intensive care at NZ$13,000 a week.
Dr Herbert Stiller, specialist in neurology and psychiatry, psychotherapy, in his book Animal Experimentation and Animal Experimenters (A Critique of Medicine Based Upon Animal Experimentation) writes:
"Life expectancy has been sinking again in the industrial countries and the number of sick persons rising, the number of deformed children with some rapidity. Shortly after the War, one could reckon on deformities, or genetic defects in one percent of new-born babies. Today, thirty years later, one finds genetic deficiencies in every third child... thirty-three percent.
An increase in deformities ranging from 20 to 30 fold in a single generation gives cause for thought. In the same way thirty years ago cancer in children was regarded as a medical rarity, but today more children are dying of cancer than any other disease. The increase in harmful effects on health seems paradoxically to go hand in hand with an increase in the number of scientists."
In Great Britain the Cystic Fibrosis Research Trust, after twenty-five years of dosing rats repeatedly with Reserpine (a drug used in people for high blood pressure, and which causes suicidal tendencies and cancer of the breast, effects impossible to predict from animal studies) and the study of "juvenile" atrophy of the pancreas in the German shepherd dog, has yet to find "precisely how cystic fibrosis of the pancreas in humans is caused". But the Trust is "grateful to the public" which it says is "most generous" enabling the continuance of its work which has reached an "exciting" point.
(In a letter from the Trust dated May 1 1987.)
Abolitionists have written to the Trust complaining that as the action of a given chemical drug in one species cannot possibly be predicted and applied when given to another species - whatever their condition, this outlay of money in animal manipulation is unjustifiable.
The author agrees; like our British counterparts we ask how long it will take for the public to learn that they are being milked money to maintain "exciting" careers in vivisection that will never bring about health betterment, only more miseries. The authorities should heed the words of professionals like Dr Herbert Stiller who warns (above) that every third child can now expect to be born with genetic defects, the increase of which goes hand in hand with the increase in bio-medical researchers (vivisectors). Heed should also be taken of the thousands of doctors who claim that modern drugs passed from mother to baby are the root of increasing health problems and genetic defects and deformities.
Those seeking abolition of vivisection do not seek the abolition of research, but an end to ANIMAL research. They believe that money should be spent in clinical investigation of the hereditary and environmental factors of the victims of genetic disorders, the introduction of drug-free medicines, the search for patterns and causes of dis-ease and dis-harmony, the adaptation of non-invasive techniques including psychotherapies, diet and exercise and the investigation and purification of the source of pollution much of which springs from the legalised drug-pusher. None of these advances however are lucrative to the vivisectors and their cohorts who threaten the dire consequences to human health should vivisection be abolished forever.
It is becoming however increasingly recognised that this threat merely reflects the fear for the future of the vivisectors' self-perpetuating, self-motivating, self-congratulating industry where built-in profits are guaranteed provided that the populace remains sick.
(The writer acknowledges information received from T. MacManus, U.K.)
| "For decades the most noble minds and the warmest hearts have fought in speech and writing for the abolition of vivisection, attacked animal cruelty and its priests, and despite all this they have so far achieved precious little. The reason for this lack of success lies mostly in the combination of vivisection with capitalism. Today vivisection is business... an appalling, sad business." (Dr med. Gustav Riedlin in an article on page 155, One Thousand Doctors (and many more) Against Vivisection, Hans Ruesch.) |
Refer also to section on Alzheimer's Disease, this Chapter.