Arguments Against Animal Testing In Medical Research

Each year, several million rabbits, mice, and rats, as well as other laboratory animals, are slated to die over the next decade in order to advance the knowledge of science (Coghlan, 2002). Many people have come to view this use of animals as unethical, while others argue that animal testing is the only truly adequate way to test the safety of new products and medicines. In addition to taking the philosophical high ground, examination of why researchers should consider alternatives to animal testing in laboratories show that the arguments against this practice are persuasive and backed up with empirical research. These arguments state that (1) animal testing is often simply an entrenched procedure, which is continued due to tradition and law,

This test has researchers expose groups of animals to successively higher doses of a chemical until half the group dies. Even though other countries abandoned this practice years ago in favor of alternative methods for measuring toxicity, the EPA only abandoned this practice reluctantly in 2000 (Coghlan, 2002). Rather than acquiesce to the growing public opposition against animal testing, the US Animal Welfare Act of 2002 downgraded rats, mice and birds to "non-animal" status so that they would not be protected by the legislation (Coghlan, 2002). According to Michael Balls, the head of the European Centre for the Validation of Alternative Methods, many researcher simply feel more comfortable with animal testing because these tests are familiar, even when the tests are known to unreliable and of questionable relevance (Keville,

Their presence in a new medicine can fool the brain into thinking the body is cooler than it really is and elicit a feverish response. Therefore, beginning in the 1940s, rabbits were used to test for feverish reactions from new treatments (Research, 2003). It costs roughly 250 million in Euros for European scientists to test 200,000 rabbits in this type of test (Research, 2003). New alternative tests to the traditional rabbit test have several advantages--they is less labor involved; they are cheaper and they are more sensitive than the traditional test (Research, 2003). As this suggests, animal testing can be extremely expensive. A proposed regulation in the European Union would require between four and five million new animal tests, over the previous regulation (Scott, 2002). Numerous US agencies, such as the Food and Drug Administration, have approved the use of Corrositex, a protein membrane that is designed to mimic the function of human skin to replace rabbit skin tests. This test provides results in a matter of hours at the cost of just $100 per test, as compared to 21 days and a cost of $1000 for a single Draize rabbit test (Keville, 2002). In short, alternative methods are frequently more accurate, cheaper and faster than traditional animal