Abstract
Studies that appear in various medical journals repeatedly demonstrate that animal testing amounts to wasting human and animal lives. Medicines and vaccines that are successfully developed and proven effective in animals such as mice and many primates fail when used in human beings. Medicines and chemicals that are effective in animals end up being relabelled after they produce side effects in human beings that were not observed in animals during the testing. Many of them also become dangerous to human beings.
Therefore, animal tests yield little success, which can be extrapolated to human beings. This situation makes the testing problematic. Nevertheless, institutions that conduct the testing continue to receive funding from charitable entities and government organisations such as NIM and societies that include the Cancer Society for America. This paper argues that animal tests amount to wastage of resources that could have otherwise been channelled to non-animal testing approaches such as computer simulations, which have proven effective in yielding accurate results that are critical in understanding human disease biology. It makes a wakeup call to stop animal testing.
Introduction
An excess of 100, 000,000 animals such as Guinea pigs, rats, rabbits, and frogs among others find themselves victims of animal experiments. Researchers kill such animals by giving them toxins in the interest of satisfying human curiosity through experimentation, conducting of trainings for medical students, and/or testing of cosmetics, various foods, chemical, and drugs. The objective is to relate the effects that these products would produce on human beings.
The animals used in the experiments are secluded from others by confining them to cages. This process has the implication of psychologically tormenting them. In some situations, they may have their skulls drilled, their spinal cords crushed, or their skins burned. Consequently, the animals are treated just like any disposable equipment that is used in the scientific laboratory. They simply have limited or even no right at all.
The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the National Institute of Health (NIM) among others have the responsibility of helping to develop long-term solutions to mitigate the use of animals in experiments that yield outcomes that cannot be correlated to disease biology in human beings. Why are the utilised resources not channelled to research and development such as computer simulation-based research?
Where animals must be used, the researchers should ensure that regulations apply to all animals to reduce or eliminate trauma and pain. The current debate is on whether animal experiments have any value or they only amount to torturing animals to satisfy human curiosity. Indeed, people are divided on whether the results of animal experiments can be correlated to disease biology in human beings following the failure of various vaccines, for instance, AIDS immunisations, which otherwise proved effective in animals. This paper argues that animal experiments are not justifiable in any way.
Problem
Animal experiments have become problematic. Indeed, animal experimenters have documented immense failures in achieving their intended purpose. Should researchers continue with the practice when it is indeed clear that it has become a costly affair? Three examples exemplify the need for urgency in resolving problems that are associated with animal experiments. One of the claims is that major achievements in medicine may be attributed to various experiments that have been done using animals as specimens.
Pound and Bracken (2014) evaluate this claim by arguing that it received no support from any scholarly evidence. Animal experiment may not be relevant in any way to human medicine. It does not give rise to any reliable evidence for leading to any curing breakthrough of diseases, including Cancer and HIV/AIDS. Woloshin and Schwartz (2006) assert that the only reason why animal experiments are so popular is that universities, various lobby groups, and media platforms exaggerate the potential of the experiments to lead to the discovery of new cures.
A second example is exemplified by the claim that without testing drugs on people, the only option would be conducting tests on people. This claim does not justify experimenting drugs on animals. Indeed, whether drugs are first tested on animals or not, one person will ultimately test them. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) argued that about 92% of drugs proved safe after they were experimented on animals (Woloshin & Schwartz, 2006).
However, they ultimately failed during trials that were made on people since they either failed to work or became dangerous on people. As quoted by Woloshin and Schwartz (2006), Food and Drug Administration reckons small percentages of drugs that are identified as safe to people are relabelled due to side effects that are not recognised in the animal testing phases.
A third claim is that animal experiments such as dissection are necessary in training medical students. Over 90% of different US-based medical training institutions such as Harvard, Yale, and Stanford have no prerequisite for deploying animal experiments in training their students. In fact, the institutions do not include experience in animal dissection as their prerequisites for admission. Rather, the institutions deploy techniques such as interactive computer programs, people-patient simulations, and clinical experience in training. Additionally, certification as a surgeon requires no experience in animal experimentation. Consequently, there is a need to develop solutions to the problem of animal experiment.
Solution
Animal testing leaves animals suffering from psychological distress and physical pain. To deal with this challenge, the US government embarked on controlling the use of animals in testing and experimentations. However, this strategy has brought no fruits due to under inclusion of animals in the protection laws. Indeed, irrespective of recognition of the number of animals that suffer from distress and pain in laboratories, only minimal regulations exist in many nations to guarantee protection or prevention of their use even in an event where other alternative approaches that do not use animals are available.
Goodman (2015) asserts, “In the US, the species most commonly used in experiments (mice, rats, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians) comprise 99% of all animals in laboratories, but are specifically exempted from even the minimal protection of the federal Animal Welfare Act (AWA)” (p. 2). Laboratories that deploy these animal species do not have any enforceable law demanding them to offer veterinary care to the animals, offer a means of pain relief, and/or consider an alternative approach, instead of just relying on animal testing.
Laboratories that deal in animal testing have no law requiring their investigation or inspection by an institution such as the USDA. Conn and Parker (2008) estimate that more than 800 American-based laboratories that conduct animal testing do not have any federal law to comply with because they mainly experiment using unregulated animals. In fact, the USDA regulates about 11, 000 established entities where beyond 1200 of them are termed as research facilities that have only 120 inspectors in charge of overseeing their operations (Office of Inspector General, 2014).
The Office of Inspector General’s report also indicates that these facilities do not even meet the basic standards established by the AWA and other oversight authorities such as the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees (IACUCs). Indeed, the Office of Inspector General (2014) concludes, “in 2012, the USDA reduced its penalties to AWA violators by an average of 86 percent, even in cases involving animal deaths and egregious violations” (p. 15). This failure underlines the importance of adopting other alternatives such as reducing the funding for animal testing and experimentation or adopting alternatives to animal experimentation and testing.
With or without their knowledge, people contribute money to charitable organisations or via taxes and lotteries to fund organisations that conduct animal testing. The granting agencies for the US government such as the NIH are major sources of animal experimentation funding. Pankevich (2012) reveals, “Approximately 47 percent of NIH-funded research involves experimentation on nonhuman animals, and in 2012, NIH budgeted nearly $30 billion for research and development” (p. 31).
The Cancer Society for the US also significantly contributes to the funding of animal experiments with anticipations of a scientific breakthrough for discovery of cancer medication. This funding is done, despite concerns about the extrapolation of scientific research findings based on animal testing to apply to human beings. For example, despite the successful treatment of cancer in Mice, 500, 000 people now die of the same disease in the US each year. Hence, a recommended solution involves withdrawing funding for such testing and experimentation and committing more resources to non-animal experimentation. In fact, this option is my best solution for dealing with the problem of animal testing.
The way forward to the problems of animal experimentation is the withdrawal of funding for animal experimentation. Pound and Bracken (2014) support the solution by asserting, “if research conducted on animals continues to be unable to reasonably predict what can be expected in humans, the public’s continuing endorsement and funding of preclinical animal research seems misplaced” (p.18). An example of dealing with the problem involves reconsidering researching using people who volunteer for testing. Such volunteers can receive mild doses of the drugs under study before examining their responses.
Where the object of study proves toxic to human beings or the result implications are sufficient to produce threats to their lives, then vitro studies and complex computational simulation approaches are available. These approaches are justifiable since they can be extrapolated easily and reliably to apply to the larger population. In fact, groundbreaking technologies that involve the use of non-animal experimentations have proved highly reliable and accurate when compared to animal approaches (Junhee, 2013). This finding underlines the principle of ethical medicine. Implementing this solution requires public opinion. The NIH and other organisations that fund animal testing need to hear that people do not want their taxes and hard-earned monetary resources being used for funding animal experimentation projects.
Conclusion
Animal testing involves using animals in conducting experiments that seek to control various variables, which influence how biological systems behave in the process of conducting the study. In these processes, animals are forced to undergo intense pain as their skulls are drilled, skin burned, and/or their spinal cord crushed. The goal of conducting the testing is to determine the effects of new cosmetics, drugs, and chemical on these animals to prevent people from suffering their side effects in case they are directly used on them. Others are conducted for curiosity reasons. Irrespective of the purpose of animal testing, their failure to apply to human beings justifies the need to save animals from the distress, trauma, and pain they undergo during testing.
Reference List
Conn, M., & Parker, J. (2008). The animal research war. New Jersey, NJ: Palgrave Macmillan.
Goodman, J. (2015). Trends in animal use at the US research facilities. Journal of Medical Ethics, 2(1), 1-3.
Junhee, S. (2013). Genomic responses in mouse models poorly mimic human inflammatory diseases. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(1), 3507-3512.
Office of Inspector General. (2014). Animal and plant health inspection service oversight of research facilities. New York, NY: The U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Pankevich, D. (2012). International animal research regulations: Impact on neuroscience research. Washington, DC: National Academies Press.
Pound, P., & Bracken, M. (2014). Is animal research sufficiently evidence based to be a cornerstone of biomedical research? Biomedical Journal, 348(7961), 18-19.
Woloshin, S., & Schwartz, L. (2006). Media reporting on research presented at scientific meetings: More caution needed. The Medical Journal of Australia, 184(1), 576-580.