Vigil calls for end to breeding lab dogs

“One argument against animal testing has not really been touched on in this lengthy debate. The simple fact is that the majority of animal tests are carried out by 'technicians' with basic passes in English and Maths GCSE if that. Most of them would struggle to get a job in McDonalds.

For example, a well-known animal research centre in Cambridgeshire back in the early 2000s was shown to have technicians returning to work in the afternoon drunk and the widespread 'fixing' of data to give the 'correct answer'. Was anything done about this? Not really - except security was improved to prevent more undercover reporters/activists showing how bad the situation was.

The simple fact is animal testing is the quickest way to get a product to market. It's not the best or the most thorough but when share holders are breathing down your neck, product development lead time is the most important factor.

SpeakResearch is however correct with one argument, the laws of the land do dictate that animal research is carried out on many products. This will never change while the same companies who rely on these animal tests wield such power in government. It may be no surprise to many that Blair was such an advocate of animal testing because he received 18 million for one election campaign alone from pro-vivisection lobbyists. That guy would have backed anything if you paid him enough....”

“Also, I wonder if I may have your permission to print this exact debate in a local pamphlet? I think the public would find it a fascinating read.”

“Furthermore, we are 'not there yet' as you put it because of organisations such as the one you are speaking for that attempt to sway people away from the non-animal testing arguments, the powerful lobbying in the vivisection industry and archaic legislation. Fortunately, change is on its way. The public are becoming increasingly aware of the horror going on behind closed doors and demanding to know why money isn't being put into developing the scientific alternatives that are there.

Many of your other points I simply disagree with. I think had non-animal testing methods been employed then we would have had a better prediction of adverse drug reactions and lives would have been saved. We are a long way forward from the dark ages of medicine when we were severing pigs nerves and I suggest pro-animal testing organisations move forward with the science rather than battling against it. We are now making medical progress IN SPITE of animal testing, rather than because of it.”

“Apologies for the late reply but I feel it is only a limited use of my time to indulge in this debate. I would recommend that any of the members of the public reading this who want to find out about what really goes on in the vivisection labs and the failings of animal tests do a little research online.

Your arguments are rife with poor logical reasoning and straw man fallacies, i.e. misrepresenting what I have said and pretending I have said something other.

- I didn't say bleach was being poured in dogs eyes in any lab (straw man fallacy on your part). I said bleach was poured in rabbits eyes (truth) and dogs are used in toxicology experiments (truth). Do you want me to link to some of the many experiements?

- Your point about vivisection in relation to chickens being eaten is confused logic to say the least. How does one have any bearing on the other at all? Deaths of animals in one area is entirely irrelevant to deaths of animals in another area, one cannot possibly negate the other purely because of numerical difference. Let us use a human example of suffering that will highlight your odd logic. A hundred people are killed. If the following day somewhere else a thousand people are killed in a different way, does it then mean that the first incident is of no consequence at all because of the difference in numbers?

Each day animals in vivisection labs go through hell on earth. They are tortured, maimed, blinded, forced to inhale toxic substances, burned, injected, cut open and ultimately killed and discarded. This does not suddenly go away or become morally justifiable because more animals are dying in other industries.

- I haven't focused on toxicology, you did. You wrongly suggested that I said microdosing would be used for toxicology research (straw man fallacy again). What I did say about toxicology, is that toxicity tests using animals are not representative for human beings due to species-specific pharmaco-toxicological effects, roughly translated as: we do not have the same biology as a non-human animal.

You ask what tests would replace animal tests. Why not ask Dr. Hadwen's Trust who are doing pioneering research in this area. They are reprogramming adult human cells to become liver cells to enable much more accurate toxicology research than the hit-and-miss animal tests in this area that predict human side effects only between 5% - 25% of the time. If more money had been put into this area already, rather than wasting so much on animal testing, we would no doubt already have these amazing scientific developments and numerous others. The science is there, it just needs the money behind it that is being thrown at animal testing.

Throughout the 1980's DHT pioneered cell culture research into diseases such as Aids, Cancer and Diabetes, and this cell culture research is now used in nearly every field of medical research. This organisation is the future and what people should be supporting now to end the suffering.

- You say we need the whole animal animal system and talk specifically about mice. Ok, let's talk about mice. Oncologist Paul Bunn, who leads the International Society for the Study of Lung Cancer has this to say: "Animal models have not been very predictive of how well drugs would do in people... We put a human tumor under the mouse's skin, and that microenvironment doesn't reflect a person's—the blood vessels, inflammatory cells or cells of the immune system, all of which affect prognosis and survival." Affect prognosis and survival he says, i.e. animal testing is a serious detriment to human health.”

“RIght Tallyou - I will bite.

1. Yes only 0.1%of research is on dogs - the total number of animals in around 3.79 million of which 97% are mice, rats, birds and fish. Compare that with 900 million chickens eaten every year for food.

2. You said millions of animals are dying each year for cosmetics and household products without any suggestion that neither practise was occurring in the UK. Also in which lab, anywhere, are they currently pouring bleach on dogs?

3. Your New Scientist article is an opinion piece - one with many flaws. The concordance of results is interesting, many of the studies which point out problems often say animal research needs to be done better - not ignored. Common reasons include carcinogen studies which only run for a matter of months rather than years - few carcinogens work that quickly. If you look at a list of 43 drugs that harmed humans then of course they are the drugs that got through animal tests - most passed many stages of human tests as well - are human models non predictive? It also ignores all the drugs which didn't harm humans where the concordance of results is very high with animals, and the drugs which were removed at the animal stage for being dangerous and never made it into humans.

4. The 92% statistic is a huge misrepresentation. Yes 92% (actually about 94%) pass in animals and fail in humans. However, 86% of drugs pass in Stage I clinical trials in humans and go on to fail at a later stage clinical trial - does 86% mean that humans are non-predictive for other humans? The main role of animal tests is to remove potentially dangerous drugs from moving onto the next stage, and the fact there have been no Phase I trial deaths and only one major incident (TGN1412) in the last 30 years shows that its very effective at that.

5. Vioxx was signed off as safe for the public (incorrectly) NOT because of animal tests, but because it passed as safe in thousands upon thousands of clinical trial patients. The side effect is relatively rare, but so many prescriptions were given out that it ended up causing huge numbers of deaths.

6. The non-animal methods you mention are excellent. They are helping to replace and reduce animal research. We should continue to develop them, but we're not there yet - not even close - to replacing animal research at the moment.”

“You focus in on toxicology. Remember that non-animal methods are already used alongside animal tests to complement them. What battery of non-animal tests do you recommend can replace animal use in this area. I would not pretend that animal tests are perfect - they are not - but even human clinical trials are not perfect models for the next human. It's a matter of putting extra protections for human health.

In the wider area of basic research there is simply no alternative in many situations - how do we look at how a gene expresses itself without using a whole animal system which can give show the gene expression? Genetic research is now a huge part of animal research - with GM mice being the main cause of rise in the numbers of procedures carried out.

If you want to discuss the scientific reviews, then you may care to read the four major independent reviews into the ethics and efficacy of animal research - all four said animal research remained essential to modern medicine - House of Lords Select Committee 2002, Animal Procedures Committee 2003, Nuffield Council on Bioethics 2005, Weatherall Report 2006.”

“Also, you say dogs are 0.1 % of research animals. 2010 official figures show what 3,727 dogs were used in UK medical research. That means how many animals are dying in the UK each year then?

I wholly refute the idea that I am misrepresenting research. Nowhere in my post did I state that it is the UK that millions of animals die for cosmetics testing. This was a global day of action about a global issue. As you are well aware, many cosmetics, toiletries and household products that have been tested on animals are sold in the UK. There is currently nothing to prevent companies testing on animals overseas and then selling their products in the EU. Or do the tortured animals that die for mascara not matter as long as it's not directly on our doorstep?

Read a fantastic article in The New Scientist recently regarding animal testing, written by a geneticist and a pharmacologist. If I could highlight some key points of this illuminating article:

"Many studies have calculated the ability of animal tests to predict adverse reactions to be at or below 50 per cent. In 2008, a study in Theriogenology (vol 69, p 2) concluded: "On average, the extrapolated results from studies using tens of millions of animals fail to accurately predict human responses." And a recent study in Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology (vol 64, p 345) shows that animal tests missed 81 per cent of the serious side effects of 43 drugs that went on to harm patients."

"In its 2007 report, Toxicity Testing in the 21st Century: A Vision and a Strategy, the US National Research Council called for the replacement of animal tests: "The vision for toxicity testing in the 21st century articulated here represents a paradigm shift from the use of experimental animals... toward the use of more efficient in vitro tests and computational techniques."

"Currently, 92 per cent of new drugs fail clinical trials, even though they have successfully passed animal tests. This is mostly because of toxicity, which can be serious and even fatal for the people taking part in the trials. For example, in 2006, six people enrolled in a UK trial of the drug TGN1412 were hospitalised after developing multiple organ failure. Many clinical trials are now conducted in India, where, according to India's Tribune newspaper, at least 1725 people died in drug trials between 2007 and 2011. Clearly, there is an urgent need for better methods to predict the safety of medicines for patients as well as volunteers in clinical trials.

At the patient safety charity, Safer Medicines, we believe this goal is most likely to be achieved through a greatly increased focus on human, rather than animal, biology in preclinical drugs tests. New tests based on human biology can predict many adverse reactions that animal tests fail to do, and could, for example, have detected the risk signals produced by Vioxx, which in animal studies appeared to be safe, and even beneficial to the heart.

These techniques include: human tissue created by reprogramming cells from people with the relevant disease (dubbed "patient in a dish"); "body on a chip" devices, where human tissue samples on a silicon chip are linked by a circulating blood substitute; many computer modelling approaches, such as virtual organs, virtual patients and virtual clinical trials; and microdosing studies, where tiny doses of drugs given to volunteers allow scientists to study their metabolism in humans, safely and with unsurpassed accuracy. Then there are the more humble but no less valuable studies in ethically donated "waste" tissue.

These innovations promise precious insights into the functioning of the integrated human system. Many are already commercially available, but they are not being embraced with the enthusiasm they merit."”

“Interesting comments, although I roundly dispute a lot of what you say, as do many leading scientists who are increasingly calling for a proper scientific debate into the virtues of non-animal testing methods versus archaic animal tests.

You say that microdosing won't tell us anything about toxicology. Well who said that it would? Just because I said it was an alternative to animal-testing, I didn't say it would be used for every aspect of medical research. It would be used in conjunction with other non-animal testing methods.

There are hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific articles about toxicology and how we need to move away from animal tests as they don't accurately reflect human biology. Look in the PMC toxicology archives.

"Current test systems are mainly based on animals or in vitro–cultured animal-derived cells and do not or not sufficiently mirror the situation in humans [...] Many toxicological test systems are problematic, because toxicity tests using animals are not representative for human beings due to species-specific pharmaco-toxicological effects. Such inter-species differences were detected for example, in the cases of 13-cis retinoic acid (Anon 1987; Hendrickx 1998) and of thalidomide (Nau 1990; Nau 1993; Tzimas et al. 1994). Specifically, the dramatic consequences of the teratogenic effects of thalidomide in human beings urgently led to the need of new and optimized human-specific test systems."”

“Re: Tallyhou comments:

Your talk of alternatives shows some grave misunderstandings. We are developing these new methods, but these are used to complement not replace animal research. Some animal research is replaced by them, which is fantastic, but more often they are used in conjunction. E.g. microdosing will tell you nothing about the toxicology or therapeutic value of a new drug. It gives information about how the drug is broken down in the body which helps scientists understand some of the possible side effects.

With regards to withdrawn drugs - remember that no drug is released onto market on the basis of animal tests, but instead on the basis of large-scale human clinical trials. So if you are blaming animal models for being non-predictive over Vioxx you should be explaining that human clinical trials were non-predictive too - do you think computer models would fare any better? TGN1412 showed exactly why Phase I clinical trials are carried out - it is the only disaster of its kind in decades - its rarity is because animal tests effectively remove dangerous drugs before the early clinical trials.

Please do not misrepresent research. In the UK there was NO animal research for household or cosmetic products in 2011. Cosmetic testing is banned and we should expect no household product tests in the 2012 stats when they are released in July.”

“I think developments in non-animal methods are crucial. There is great work funded by the NC3Rs and the Doctor Hadwen Trust, as well as generally by university's and pharmaceuticals who are always keen to look for cheaper, more ethical alternatives, to animal research.

However, for the time being we must accept that there is no blanket alternative for animal research. Current laws mean they can only be used where there is no other alternative. Safety Testing (a relatively small part of overall animal research) is the only area where animal use is mandated, and that is only after drugs have gone through a host of non-animal screening methods to ensure that only the better drug candidates go through to animal and then human trials.

Dogs are only 0.1% of research animals, but they have played a crucial role in stem cell research and paralysis research (and often combinations of the two). Historically dogs have been used for the research which led to insulin and blood transfusions - both of which have been essential for human health.

Check out http://tinyurl.com/m7h8qt”