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

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DRUGS AND THE LAW

SECTION 2 - Vivisectors condemn "animal research"

As has been belaboured throughout this work much of the criticism that vivisection is unworkable, unjustified and unnecessary comes straight from the vivisectors.  The following evidence reveals they also unashamedly, repeatedly insist that it takes rather than saves lives!

Recently in the United States of America the General Accounting Office announced that 51.5 percent of drugs introduced between 1976 and 1985 had to be relabelled because of "serious side effects" discovered after they were marketed.  These included heart, liver and kidney failure, severe blood disorders, birth defects, respiratory arrest, seizures and blindness.
("Postapproval Risks 1976-1985", FDA Drug Review.)

Though doctors openly refuting vivisection are growing in number, and, working in conjunction with abolitionist groups around the world are becoming a force to be reckoned with, the author wishes to demonstrate yet again that the greatest critic of the present reliance on "animal research" is the vivisector himself, and accordingly the author uses today's leading vivisectors to counter ARSL's claim that animal testing is the correct method for developing drugs designed for human beings.  The following condemnation of vivisection, freely given and published by researchers working from vantage points within the industry equates with the constant, seemingly endless incidence of drugs withdrawn from the market because of the damage they cause the unwitting patient.

Vivisector Ralph Heywood, formerly scientific director of the infamous Huntingdon Contract Research Laboratories (now a consultant toxicologist), in 1990 compiled an analysis of the major drug side-effects occurring since the Thalidomide disaster which reveals that 85 percent were NOT predicted and could never have been predicted by animal experiments.  The following example of his comments is taken from the analysis:

OPREN

An arthritis drug.  Given to over 500,000 patients.  Withdrawn in 1982.  Serious side effects over 4,000, include skin rashes, liver and kidney-damage and 61 deaths in Great Britain alone.  Produced by Eli Lilly which noted in its literature:

"The effects of Opren in the Rhesus monkey were studied for a year.  There were no apparent adverse effects of survival."

Heywood's Comment... "Symptoms experienced with humans could never be detected in animals."

ERALDIN

A heart drug.  Produced by I.C.I.  Given to thousands of patients.  Caused severe damage to eyes, blindness and many deaths.  In 1976 Great Britain's chemical giant announced that it had started paying compensations to the victims (or their survivors) of Eraldin which had had "seven years of very intensive tests".

(I.C.I. carried out toxicity tests on Eraldin in rats and mice, in monkeys and rats for 2 weeks, in 70 rats and 24 dogs for 13 weeks, in 100 mice for 18 months and in 3 groups of 13 pregnant rabbits.  Results from these tests led them to believe that Eraldin "is remarkably free from toxic effects".  In just over 5 years, June 29 1970 to October 1 1975 it claimed 7,000 victims in the United Kingdom alone.
(Liberator, August/September 1984.))

Heywood's Comment... "No-one has been able to reproduce the harmful effects in animals - even after the drug was withdrawn in 1976."

CHLORAMPHENICOL

The antibiotic drug Chloramphenicol was responsible for causing leukemia and fatal aplastic anaemia in human beings.

• "This drug was tried out for long periods on dogs and found to produce only a transient anaemia, but fatal results have followed its use in human disease..."
  (Editorial, Medical Review, September 1953.)
• "Extensive experiments on dogs failed to show evidence of injury or disease to the canine species."
  (Bulletin, Easton, Massachusetts, April 2 1953.)
• "We were resting secure in the knowledge that we had two effective drugs for use in typhoid fever: chloramphenicol and ampicillin.  Then a strain of typhoid bacilli was found that was resistant to chloramphenicol... resistant bacteria are increasing blood poisoning in hospital patients treated with antibiotics."
  (International Herald Tribune, December 9-10 1972.)

Heywood's Comment... "Damage not predicted by animal experiments."

From his analysis and supporting data Heywood concluded that there is only a 5 to 25 percent correlation between harmful effects in people and the results of animal experiments.  Apart from failing to reveal many of the hazards of drugs thus "tested" on animals, such "tests" must also lead to the rejection of potentially valuable medicines because they produce side-effects in animals which never occur in people.  Many long established drugs show sufficient toxicity in animals to make it extremely unlikely they would be marketed today were they submitted to animal tests now required by law.  For example penicillin which is lethal for guinea-pigs, Frusemide which causes severe liver damage in mice but which is a valuable diuretic for human beings and iron sorbitol which causes cancer in rats and rabbits but which is used successfully in treating iron-deficiency anaemia in people.

The following further examples of the dangers inherent in extrapolating effects in animals to the human patient are taken from Heywood's analysis:

Vivisector of the highest order, Dr Miles Weatherall, former Director of Wellcome Research Laboratories berates the vivisection principle thus:

"Every species has its own metabolic pattern, and no two species are likely to metabolise a drug identically."
(Nature, April 1 1982, pages 387-390.)

Yet another gives good reason why vivisection should be abolished... American drug researcher Bernard Brodie went as far as saying in his Acceptance Speech of the Winner of the 1963 Torald Sollman Award, California, 1963:

"It is often a matter of pure luck that animal experiments lead to clinically useful drugs."

M.H. Briggs wrote in Biomedical Research Involving Animals, Editors Z. Bankowski and N. Howard-Jones (CIOMS 1984):

"Animal suffering could be eliminated, and the safety of medicines improved, if governments adopted a new point strategy for the introduction of new drugs."

In Outrage December/January 1992 Dr Robert Sharpe writes that this new strategy should involve replacing animal experiments by in-vitro tests with human tissues and computer prediction methods, the adaptation of more effective monitoring of drugs once they reach the market, and restriction of new drugs to those for which there is a medical need.  He claims that the idea that a combination of in-vitro (test tube) methods can correctly predict the general toxicity of chemicals is a basic assumption behind a multi-centre trial recently initiated by the Scandanavian Society for Cell Toxicology.  Dr Zucco of Italy's National Council of Research has demonstrated that "the inability of extrapolating data from animals could be solved by the use of the human cell culture".  In trials carried out at Denmark's Roskilde University Centre the lethal concentration of chemicals to human white blood-cells shows "very good correlation"... the white blood-cells being obtained from volunteers' blood samples.  In the U.S.A. a California-based company Marrow Tech Inc. has introduced complete culture systems for human bone-marrow, liver, oral mucosa and skin for in-vitro safety evaluation.  Dr Sharpe says that such human tissue tests could have warned doctors about the harmful effects of drugs like Thalidomide.

Though prominent in today's growing medical dissension against vivisection, Professor Croce is not alone but one of a long line of defectors from the vivisection camp.  In the Introduction to Vivisection or Science - a choice to make, Hans Ruesch writes that in 1912 a well-known German MD, Wolfgang Bohn, states in the medical journal Aerztliche Mitteilungen:

"The proclaimed purpose of vivisection has not been achieved in any field, and so it can be presumed that it won't be achieved in the future either.  On the contrary, vivisection has caused enormous damage, has killed thousands of people... But generations of researchers have been taught to use no other than the vivisection method."

Ruesch also writes:

"A change had to come sooner or later within the ranks of the medical doctors themselves, and this started manifesting itself in the course of the 1980s, and, a remarkable phenomenon, in various countries simultaneously, on the initiative of doctors who at first had had no contact with one another.  Their number is growing so rapidly that the mediamakers will probably not be able to stifle them all as heretofore.  The book Vivisection or Science - a choice to make is so far the most prominent medical voice of what already promises to grow into a chorus.  It will always remain the first in time.  An historic event."

As we have learned in Chapter 1 Introduction to ARTL, Hans Ruesch abandoned forever his lucrative and highly successful literary career on the day his investigations led him to the discovery that vivisection is an international plot and conspiracy that only the most brave and remarkable medical professionals dare to contest.  Unfortunately for billions of today's populations the majority of doctors, neither brave nor remarkable, aware that dissent from the mainstream of official thinking leads to professional suicide choose, perhaps understandably but at great cost to their patients' health, to be guided by the instinct of profitable survival.

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