Safer Medicines
Here’s a good way to bring yourself up to date with the scientific
arguments relating to vivisection. Europeans for Medical Progress
Trust (EMPT) is a patient safety charity that promotes human-based
medical research. Its film, Safer Medicines, showcases some of the
latest technology that EMPT believes could supplant animal tests to
deliver safer drugs to patients in less time and at less cost.
http://www.curedisease.net/safermedicines/
Safer Medicines
Safer Medicines showcases state-of-the-art approaches to ensuring that
drugs in the future will be safer than they have been in the past.
World leading scientists from industry and academia present their
vision for the future of drug development – with a focus on human
biology.
Frequently Asked Questions
Through the years, we have been assured that using animals in
biomedical research is critical to our understanding and advancement
of human medical knowledge. The reality is very different, as the
answers to the following questions will reveal.
Would drugs be safe for us without first being tested on animals?
Actually, drugs would be safer than they are now if the animal testing
phase was eliminated. Many studies have shown that animals predict
correctly for humans only 5-25% of the time: far worse than tossing a
coin!
When researchers administer potentially useful substances to animals,
they get plenty of feedback on the substances' effectiveness in the
species tested. However, results nearly always differ dramatically
between species, and there are no reliable methods of predicting a
human reaction.
Substances that could save many human lives are not approved because
they are harmful to animals. And substances that are therapeutic in
animals get approved, later harming and sometimes killing humans.
More than 10,000 people are killed every year in the UK by side
effects of prescription medicines - now the fourth biggest killer in
the western world. The US figure is over 100,000. Arthritis painkiller
Vioxx, withdrawn in 2004, caused up to 320,000 heart attacks and
strokes - as many as 140,000 of them fatal. Animal testing failed to
predict these tragedies, which could have been reduced or prevented
altogether by modern, human-based tests using DNA chips, human tissues
and micro-dose studies where volunteers are monitored with PET and
other scanners.
British company Pharmagene uses human tissue exclusively, with the
philosophy "a flood of new data on human genetics is making drug
research in animals redundant. If you have information on human genes,
what's the point in going back to animals?"
Many of our most popular drugs can be quite detrimantal to animals. So
there is justifiable concern that animal tests are preventing us from
acquiring much-needed medications, as Professor Cohn Dollery stated:
"... for the great majority of disease entities, the animal models
either do not exist or are really very poor. [We risk] overlooking
useful drugs because they do not give a response to the animal models
commonly used."[2]
92% of new drugs fail in clinical trials, after they have passed all
the safety tests in animals. Many drugs that reach the market are
later withdrawn or relabelled because of serious side effects.
Reliance on animal data allows companies to avoid the expense of
bigger and better clinical trials.
|
