WWAIL 2008 Pt. II: Vivisection: As unscientific as it is cruel

Hundreds of millions of animals suffer slow, painful deaths at the hands of experimenters at Universities, hospitals and private institutions every year in the U.S. The existing federal regulations do not require that experimenters use alternatives to animals when they are available, they provide only minimal husbandry standards for some animals in laboratories and they do not even cover mice, rats, birds and reptiles (who make up more than 95% of all animals in labs). As a result, billions of our tax dollars are squandered on mislead research that entails confining, mutilating, drugging, and fatally infecting animals with degenerative and infectious diseases in the experiments that will do little, if anything, to improve human health. Continue below for recent research on the failure of animal experiments--

• A 2007 article concluded that research has “demonstrated that animal experiments are insufficiently predictive of human outcomes to provide substantial benefits during the development of human clinical interventions, or in deriving human toxicity assessments.”
  
• A 2008 article stated that the successes claimed by proponents of animal experimentation are anecdotal and that sweeping statements about the benefits of animal experimentation are unfounded.
• A 2007 article published in the British Medical Journal reported that the “lack of concordance between animal experiments and clinical trials may be due to…the failure of animal models to adequately represent human disease.” Similarly, an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association in concluded that "patients and physicians should remain cautious about extrapolating the findings of prominent animal research to the care of human disease."
• The FDA reports that only 8% of all drugs progressing to human trials after demonstration of safety in animal studies will gain approval. Further, roughly 50% of these approved drugs will be withdrawn or receive black-box warning labels after showing side effects or toxicities not detected in animals.
• In a 2007 report commissioned by the EPA, the National Science Foundation's National Research Council (NRC) concluded, "Current [animal toxicity] tests...provide little information on modes and mechanisms of action...and little or no information for assessing variability in human susceptibility." The NRC concluded "that a transformative paradigm shift [toward non-animal test methods] is needed to achieve the design criteria set out in the committee's interim report:... (2) to reduce the cost and time of testing, (3) to use fewer animals and cause minimal suffering in the animals used, and (4) to develop a more robust scientific basis for assessing health effects." Based on these concerns, the NRC advocated for a new approach to toxicity testing based on exclusively "computational biology and a comprehensive array of in vitro tests based on human biology."
• Still unconvinced? Try here, here and here.
  

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