Pacific Free Press was launched in March 2007 by Dutch-Canadian Richard
Kastelein of V.O.F. Expathos, in the Netherlands along with Chris Cook- CFUV radio journalist and Editor in Chief of Pacific Free Press. Cook is based in , Victoria, British Columbia.
The mission of Pacific Free Press is simple: to dig out nuggets of truth from
the slag-heap of lies, ignorance and witless diversion that has buried
public discourse today. Pacific Free Press provides a new venue for
disseminating hard news and insightful, fact-based analysis of the
harsh realities too often ignored or distorted by the mainstream press.
Lab Rats, Corporate Science, and the Monsters We’ve All Become Mickey Z.
The January 24 Associated Press (AP) story was unashamedly entitled, “Lab rats out of a job.” (It made me think if AP writer Michael Hill had covered the liberation of Auschwitz, he’d have declared Europe’s Jews to suddenly be “homeless.”)
In the piece, Hill talks of possible “high-tech alternatives” to animal experimentation. Before you view this as a major scientific and moral step forward, allow me to present Hill’s closing salvo:
“Taylor Bennett, senior science adviser to the National Association for Biomedical Researchers, said animal testing maintains an essential role in making sure new pharmaceutical products are safe and effective for humans.”
“Atrocities are no less atrocities when they occur in laboratories and are called medical research."
- G. Bernard Shaw
Safe and effective? Not so, says Robert Mendelsohn, M.D. "The
reason why I am against animal research is because it doesn't work,” he
explains. “It has no scientific value and every good scientist knows
that."
Aysha Z Akhtar, M.D., M.P.H., a senior medical advisor and Jarrod
Bailey, Ph.D., a senior research consultant for the Physicians
Committee for Responsible Medicine, concur.
“The more we study the
relevance of animal tests, the more apparent their shortcomings
become,” Akhtar and Bailey state in a Feb. 9, 2007 letter published in
the British Medical Journal. “Even subtle physiological differences
between humans and animals can manifest as profound differences in
disease physiology and treatment effectiveness and safety. For example,
numerous differences in spinal cord physiology and reaction to injury
exist between species and even strains within a species. These
differences likely contribute to the repeated failure of spinal cord
treatments that have tested safe and effective in animals to translate
into human benefit.”
In addition, say Akhtar and Bailey, “tests
in rodents for predicting human carcinogenicity with a false negative
rate approaching two-thirds, potentially caus(ed) widespread human
exposure to carcinogens.” They also point at wonder drugs like Vioxx,
which failed to show adverse reactions in animal tests but ended up to
be potentially deadly for humans.
"Results from animal tests
are not transferable between species, and therefore cannot guarantee
product safety for humans,” agrees Herbert Gundersheimer, M.D.
“A
major shift in our research paradigm is long overdue,” declare Akhtar
and Bailey. “The move away from animal experiments toward more accurate
methods of studying disease and intervention is scientifically superior
and more ethical for humanity, as well as for animals.”
"Ask the
experimenters why they experiment on animals, and the answer is:
'Because the animals are like us,'” says Professor Charles R. Magel.
“Ask the experimenters why it is morally OK to experiment on animals,
and the answer is: 'Because the animals are not like us.' Animal
experimentation rests on a logical contradiction."
If animal
experimentation is both ethically indefensible cruelty and speciously
spurious science, why are we still subjected to ill-informed media
articles like Michael Hill’s “Lab rats out of a job”? Dr. Gundersheimer
has a possible answer:
"In reality (animal) tests do not provide
protection for consumers from unsafe products, but rather they are used
to protect corporations from legal liability."
(Did I just hear someone shout out “Bingo”?)
As
James Baldwin once reminded us:
"People who shut their eyes to reality
simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on
remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead
turns himself into a monster."
Mickey Z. is the author of the
forthcoming novel, CPR for Dummies (Raw Dog Screaming Press). He can be
found on the Web at http://www.mickeyz.net.
Writings 
Subscribe to this comment's feed
