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This book is a passionate denunciation of animal experiments in modern medicine and research. The author, Bette Overell, believes animal research is unscientific, and that animals and humans are so different that the results of animal research are not only invalid, but dangerous, for humans.
The book also attacks orthodox medicine in general. It accuses doctors, researchers and drug companies of taking part in a world-wide conspiracy to falsify research results, all in the name of boosting company profits and keeping researchers in work.
The following are paraphrased versions of key statements of belief which appear in Animal Research Takes Lives. They are followed by ANZCCART responses which are based on the best available medical and scientific information.
Statement 1:
People and animals are healthier nowadays due to better knowledge about health and hygiene. This is due to better social hygiene, rather than medical advances based on animal research.
It is true that people in the developed world enjoy better health and a greater life expectancy due to the economic and social advances of the last century.
But animal research has played a major role in this advance, by enabling scientists to find cures for specific diseases like smallpox, tetanus and polio.
Much current animal research focuses on diseases like cancer. While modern lifestyles may play some part in the development of cancers, the purely biological features can only be identified through animal research.
Statement 2:
Humans and animals are biologically different. This invalidates the use of animals in research.
There are in fact many similarities between humans and animals which validate the use of animals in research. However, the use of animal models is not limited by the degree to which humans and a given species are biologically similar.
For example, testing the susceptibility of different strains of rats to infections can help scientists discover why some human beings fall prey to infections and diseases, while others do not catch the disease at all.
At the same time, cells of the same type, even though from different species, can behave in almost identical ways. The strength of using animals in research lies in knowing both the similarities and differences between animals and humans.
Statement 3:
Vaccines developed using animal research are unsafe. Smallpox vaccine, for example, is said to have caused severe illness and even death in some people.
Smallpox vaccine is one of the most successful preventative medicines ever used. It has completely eradicated this disfiguring and potentially fatal disease from the world.
In deciding to use smallpox vaccines when they were first produced, doctors had to weigh up the benefits (prevention of death and disease in thousands of people), against the risks (adverse reactions by a few people, most of whom were already weakened by another disease such as cancer).
Doctors were all aware of the occasional severe side effects of smallpox vaccine. That is why, once a country had finally eradicated the disease through use of the vaccine, there was debate in medical journals over whether to discontinue use of the vaccine. While a superficial look at the debate makes it appear many doctors were opposed to vaccination, this was not the case.
Similarly, modern opposition to DPT vaccine, due to side-effects experienced by some children, ignores the very real protection it offers most children against diphtheria, whooping cough and tetanus - all of which are life-threatening and debilitating diseases.
Ironically, the very success of vaccination has tended to encourage a casual attitude towards these diseases. This is because so few parents have seen a serious case of tetanus or diphtheria.
Properly administered, DPT vaccine is safe to use. It is extremely irresponsible to spread scare stories which could influence parents not to vaccinate their children.
Statement 4:
AIDS is not a virus, it is a lifestyle disease. It is also caused and spread by an infectious contaminant in vaccines.
The author put forward two conflicting reasons for the cause and spread of AIDS, because she has indiscriminately quoted from a variety of sources. When AIDS was first discovered, its cause was unclear, and researchers debated a number of causes.
Among these were protein deficiency, antibiotics, steroids and vaccines. However, with greater knowledge, these theories were discarded. Nowadays it is clear that AIDS is caused by the HIV viruses [sic].
The spread of the virus is another matter. Lifestyle factors, such as male homosexual behaviour, intravenous drug use and blood transfusions are responsible for transmitting the disease from person to person, but these are not the cause of the disease.
Statement 5:
Many illnesses and medical conditions are caused by chemicals and other aspects of modern living. For example, insecticides are the cause of a number of animal diseases, including scrapie in sheep.
While the immune systems of both humans and animals can be weakened by a variety of factors, in most instances these do not cause disease. Rather, they make the system susceptible to infection. It is the infectious agent that causes the disease.
In any event, there is no evidence that insecticides increase the susceptibility of sheep to scrapie or other diseases.
Statement 6:
Animal Research Takes Lives cites numerous references in support of its case against animal research. This makes it the authoritative text on the topic.
Much of the scientific information referred to in the book is now out of date or culled from obscure medical journals. At least one quote is more than 100 years old, and most are pre-1970. These add little to contemporary debates.
Where the author does quote reputable sources she often misinterprets them. For example, a British paper highlighting problems in drug trials, and deploring the politics that delayed the introduction of life-saving drugs, was misinterpreted as an attack on those trials.
Other 'evidence' quoted in the book is merely the opinion of like-minded people, culled from various newspaper and magazine cuttings.
The author's scientific and medical knowledge is poor. One example among many is her contention that insulin causes blindness in diabetics, and that all diabetes can be controlled by appropriate diet.
In fact, it is diabetes itself that can lead to blindness, especially if uncontrolled. If anything insulin retards the process. Nor can all types of diabetes be controlled by diet. Type 1 diabetes, which used to be called childhood onset diabetes, always needs insulin. Type 2 (adult onset diabetes) can be controlled by diet.
The book itself is merely a collection of disaggregated quotes and cuttings which together fail to sustain a coherent argument.
The entire medical and research community is active in its search for acceptable alternatives to the use of animals in experiments driven by pressures which are both ethical and economic. Overell allows no ethical sensitivity, no feelings of humanity, responsibility or care to any of the scientists and researchers who for her are no better than the 'doctors' in the Nazi death camps. Such extremism has no place in the world of rational debate about public policy. When one considers the developments in vaccines, in surgery, in drug therapy, in organ transplants and in rehabilitation which have been based on work with animals, one surely cannot but agree that while animal lives have been lost, human lives have been saved. This poses an admitted moral dilemma and one which all those involved in animal research are grappling with in a genuine effort to find valid solutions. They will not find any of them in Overell's polemic distortion of the truth."
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ANIMAL RESEARCH T A K E S LIVES - Humans and Animals BOTH Suffer