the harmful use of animals in experiments is not only cruel but also often ineffective. Animals do not get many of the human diseases that people do, such as major types of heart disease, many types of cancer, HIV, Parkinson’s disease, or schizophrenia. Instead, signs of these diseases are artificially induced in animals in laboratories in an attempt to mimic the human disease. Yet, such experiments belittle the complexity of human conditions which are affected by wide-ranging variables such as genetics, socio-economic factors, deeply-rooted psychological issues and different personal experiences.
It is not surprising to find that treatments showing ‘promise’ in animals rarely work in humans. Not only are time, money and animals’ lives being wasted (with a huge amount of suffering), but effective treatments are being mistakenly discarded and harmful treatments are getting through. The support for animal testing is based largely on anecdote and is not backed up, we believe, by the scientific evidence that is out there.
Despite many decades of studying conditions such as cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, diabetes, stroke and AIDS in animals, we do not yet have reliable and fully effective cures.
The history of cancer research has been the history of curing cancer in the mouse. We have cured mice of cancer for decades and it simply didn’t work in human beings.
Dr. Richard Klausner, former director of the US National Cancer Institute
Unreliable animal testing
90% of drugs fail in human trials despite promising results in animal tests – whether on safety grounds or because they do not work
Cancer drugs have the lowest success rate (only 5% are approved after entering clinical trials) followed by psychiatry drugs (6% success rate), heart drugs (7% success rate) and neurology drugs (8% success rate).
Using dogs, rats, mice and rabbits to test whether or not a drug will be safe for humans provides little statistically useful insight, our recent analysis found. The study also revealed that drug tests on monkeys are just as poor as those using any other species in predicting the effects on humans.
Out of 93 dangerous drug side effects, only 19% could have been predicted by animal tests, a recent study found
Using mice and rats to test the safety of drugs in humans is only accurate 43% of the time, a recent study found
Out of 48 cancer drugs approved by the European Medicines Agency from 2009 to 2013 to treat 68 types of cancer, almost half showed no survival benefits according to a recent study. Even in cases where benefits were seen, the difference was judged to be ‘clinically insignificant’.
Wasteful animal testing
Despite the use of over 115 million animals in experiments globally each year, only 59 new medicines were approved in 2018 by the leading drug regulator, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Many of these are for rare diseases.
The US drug industry invests $50 billion per year in research, but the approval rate of new drugs is the same as it was 50 years ago.Only 6% of 4,300 international companies involved in drug development have registered a new drug with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration since 1950.
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