Spring Break
Letters to the Editor
Issue date: 1/24/07 Section: Commentary
Animal Experimentation Is Ineffective and Unnecessary
In the Jan. 22 Commentary section of The Daily Campus, an editorial was published lauding UConn for its decision to discontinue David Waitzman's nonhuman primate research at the Farmington Health Center. While the piece acknowledged the most immediate methodological concerns that ultimately ended the project, the authors fail to recognize the decidedly problematic nature of research on non-human primates, and all non-human animals, in general.
An abundance of evidence shows animal models to be poor predictors of human maladies and drug treatment. Further, accepting animal testing entails failing to recognize the moral and ethical implications that years of intensive research on non-human animals now presents - ones that threaten to trump the potency of frequently uncontested appeals to the scientific efficacy of animal research.
The scientific community includes many researchers who not only question the ethical nature of animal experiments, but their validity altogether. For example, a literature review of over 2,000 scholarly articles that was recently published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (296:14, 2006) found that of the 76 animal studies identified, only eight were successfully replicated in humans and led to a therapy being subsequently approved for human use. Similarly, a December 2006 literature review article published in the British Medical Journal (Dec 2006) reported that "many studies in animal models are of poor methodological quality" and that "lack of concordance between animal experiments and clinical trials may be due to … the failure of animal models to adequately represent human disease." These results, of course, do not account for the plethora of studies that fail and remain unpublished in perpetuity.
The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) estimate that for every 1,000 drugs that are tested on animals, only one reaches human clinical trials. Two salient examples of dangerous drugs that made it to human clinical trials were recently hot topics of discussion in mainstream media: TGN1412 and, more currently, Pfizer's torcetrapid. Both were shown to be safe in animal models but ultimately led to deaths in human subjects. Of the drugs that make it to these human trials, only one in five are eventually approved by the FDA. That's a staggering failure rate of roughly 99.99 percent! And, adding insult to injury, the drugs that reach the shelves cause over 700,000 hospital visits (i.e. Vioxx, Paxil) (AP, 10/17/06) and 100,000 deaths every year (JAMA, 279: 1200-5, 1216-7, 1998) making them the fourth leading cause of death in the U.S. These data must not be taken lightly.
In the Jan. 22 Commentary section of The Daily Campus, an editorial was published lauding UConn for its decision to discontinue David Waitzman's nonhuman primate research at the Farmington Health Center. While the piece acknowledged the most immediate methodological concerns that ultimately ended the project, the authors fail to recognize the decidedly problematic nature of research on non-human primates, and all non-human animals, in general.
An abundance of evidence shows animal models to be poor predictors of human maladies and drug treatment. Further, accepting animal testing entails failing to recognize the moral and ethical implications that years of intensive research on non-human animals now presents - ones that threaten to trump the potency of frequently uncontested appeals to the scientific efficacy of animal research.
The scientific community includes many researchers who not only question the ethical nature of animal experiments, but their validity altogether. For example, a literature review of over 2,000 scholarly articles that was recently published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (296:14, 2006) found that of the 76 animal studies identified, only eight were successfully replicated in humans and led to a therapy being subsequently approved for human use. Similarly, a December 2006 literature review article published in the British Medical Journal (Dec 2006) reported that "many studies in animal models are of poor methodological quality" and that "lack of concordance between animal experiments and clinical trials may be due to … the failure of animal models to adequately represent human disease." These results, of course, do not account for the plethora of studies that fail and remain unpublished in perpetuity.
The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) estimate that for every 1,000 drugs that are tested on animals, only one reaches human clinical trials. Two salient examples of dangerous drugs that made it to human clinical trials were recently hot topics of discussion in mainstream media: TGN1412 and, more currently, Pfizer's torcetrapid. Both were shown to be safe in animal models but ultimately led to deaths in human subjects. Of the drugs that make it to these human trials, only one in five are eventually approved by the FDA. That's a staggering failure rate of roughly 99.99 percent! And, adding insult to injury, the drugs that reach the shelves cause over 700,000 hospital visits (i.e. Vioxx, Paxil) (AP, 10/17/06) and 100,000 deaths every year (JAMA, 279: 1200-5, 1216-7, 1998) making them the fourth leading cause of death in the U.S. These data must not be taken lightly.
Viewing Comments 1 - 1 of 1
Susan Lawrence
posted 2/01/07 @ 10:28 AM EST
Good, honest article. Animal testing benefits researcher's pocketbooks, not human health. Another danger to human health is disposing of all those tortured and often poisoned animal bodies after experimenting on them. (Continued…)
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