Animal experimentation.
When I have a disease, I take a medicine to treat it. Actually we are immune to some diseases thanks to the vaccines. Let’s imagine a world with no cure for the diseases. A world where pills and medications don’t exist. Where a simple diarrhea can kill anybody because we don’t have any medication to threat it. That is the main reason for animal testing not being a negative aspect of our biomedical researches, and it’s also needed to keep humans alive. I believe that animal testing is needed in our society and it promotes awareness for future developments.
This is a very polemical topic. Almost ninety percent of all the people I know, if I ask them if they agree with animal testing, will give me a no as an answer, but they are not capable of give me any valid alternative for replacing the animals used. They, my opposition, believe that animal experimentation is a form of animal cruelty, and they don’t see it as an actual scientific research method. They also say that animals are living things, and they have the right to live like any other human. They are wrong, and with this I’m not saying that I’m in favor of animal cruelty, by the contrary, I’m against it, but we shouldn’t see it in that way. The right way to see it should be that scientists are trying to save human lives.
Let’s try to imagine a couple of parents, who have had a kid with meningitis, and let’s say that there is only one way that this child can survive to his disease. This miracle can be possible by using one machine or medicine. If we don’t test this medicine on animals first, we can’t use it to save this child, and we will have to tell his parents that we can’t save their son because there are some laboratory rats that have to live.
The first reason for using these animals is that their bodies and organs are very similar to humans. for instance the rat’s anatomy is very much like the human’s; some scientists define the rat’s anatomy as, “a scale model of the human body.” One more example lies in the heart of a pig. The pigs’ hearts are anatomically identical to any normal human heart. When the scientists made this discovery, they started to investigate if and how they could transplant a pig heart to a human body. Finally they discovered that they could do it, but it was not ethically or morally correct. If we do that, how many lives will we save? How many kids, or people in general whom are subject to a waiting list for a heart can we save?
These animals used are susceptible to the same diseases than human beings, such as glaucoma, influenza, hypertension, leukemia, asthma, diabetes, arthritis, allergies, cancer, etc. These are just a few of the diseases that humans and animals suffer, but they are more than enough to clarify my point. One of the most popular examples is the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), which we know, thanks to the studies on animals, is the result of a mutation of the Monkey Immunodeficiency Virus (MIV). One more example is the influenza disease, and actually we are immune to that horrendous disease thanks to the influenza vaccine, which was created in a laboratory and tested in animals.
The animal’s short life span allows us to study them throughout their entire life. This short life span gives to the investigators the possibility to study all the stages of a specific disease without losing a human life. Imagine how will be if we don’t experiment in animals. At first more than ninety percent of what we have discovered by testing in animals will be lost, and the
discovery of any vaccine or medicine will take us one, two or more life times, so if scientists, don’t make any mistake in their whole investigation, they can make only one discovery in their entire life, and this investigation will consume it completely.
In addition researches on animals provide much information needed to predict how a drug or procedure will affect a human being. All this information is needed to receive the legal approval that every drug or procedure must have before being given to humans. Without this regulation and the animal testing the results will be catastrophic. If we don’t test a medicine before giving it to the humans, we can do more damage than the disease by itself. Any unpredicted reaction can cause a lot of deaths, and we want to save people’s life, not end with the human kind.
There are too many diseases that have been eradicated or controlled thanks to animal testing. The most famous are rubella, mumps, polio, diphtheria, influenza, etc., and this is not all, this is jut a piece of the broad range of all the diseases eradicated by animal testing. If we compare any discovery based on animal testing with any other not based on animal testing we will see the difference. Let’s take as a reference the influenza disease vaccine, which was a discovery based in animal testing, and the infamous experiment in Tuskegee about the late stages of syphilis, which wasn’t a discovery based in animal testing (
Infoplease: Encyclopedia, Almanac, Atlas, Biographies, Dictionary, Thesaurus. Free online reference, research & homework help. ). The influenza research took to the researchers almost eight years (
www.who.int ), and the Tuskegee forty. There were no deaths in the influenza discovery, and in the Tuskegee a total of 198 persons died. Here we have a very clear example of the big difference between the researches that use animals and the ones who don’t use them.
Animal testing is an element we have present in our lives every single day, when we take an Advil for the headache or any other pain reliever, when we go to surgery, or even when we brush our teeth. Animals are used for testing because their anatomy is very similar to the human body. They are susceptible to the same diseases that we are, and their short life span allows to the researchers study all the stages of a specific disease in a shorter space of time. Thanks to the
animal testing we can predict any adverse effect of a drug in humans before using it, so we avoid another Tuskegee experiment. I have two conclusions about this topic: the first one is that, how somebody said, “science with no animal testing is like reliving the Tuskegee experiment,” and the second one is that animal testing is not a form of animal cruelty, and it shouldn’t be abolished.