Stop this archaic and cruel research (From Worcester News)
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Stop this archaic and cruel research
10:20am Monday 8th September 2008 in Read
SIR – ‘Imagine donating your body to science while you are still in it’, reads the slogan on an antivivisection poster.
Such a prospect may well fill us with horror but, sadly, it is a daily reality for the millions of animals used as disposable tools of the trade in vivisection laboratories worldwide. For laboratory animals there is no informed consent, no potential benefit and all that awaits them is a life of incarceration and suffering and, if they are lucky, an early death.
Improving human health and alleviating human suffering does not depend on animal experiments.
Indeed, if the vast amount of money, time and effort expended on this archaic, cruel and unreliable method of research was directed towards methods that are directly relevant to humans, for example clinical studies, autopsies, tissue and cell cultures, humans as well as animals would benefit.
H HANDY, Malvern.
Comments(1)
Kevin_Elliott
says...
4:52pm Tue 9 Sep 08
It is now possible to breed animals with exactly the same genetic faults that cause some human diseases. So mice with cystic fibrosis, for example, have the symptoms as children with cystic fibrosis. These mice are the ideal way to test gene therapy, which may offer a medical breakthrough.
For instance, fifty years ago, newborn babies with cystic fibrosis died shortly after birth. Now, thanks to animal based research, they are living into their thirties and longer.
We can't replicate the symptoms of cystic fibrosis in a test tube, or a cell culture,or an autopsy.
Animal research is essential if we're to advance medicine. It would be cruel and archaic to deny treatment to children with cystic fibrosis - after all, a disabled human is worth as much as an able bodied human.
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