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Researchers at the Yale School of Medicine and several UK universities looked at research using animals and concluded that there is little evidence to support the idea that animal experimentation is beneficial to humans. In fact, many of the most important advances in human health, including the discovery of the relationship between cholesterol and heart disease, smoking and cancer, the development of X-rays, and the isolation of the virus that causes AIDS, are associated with human research. Recently, members of the University of Washington Animal Welfare Committee carried misleading signs that animal experimentation was the fastest and most effective way to administer treatments and vaccinations to improve human health. They even argued that without animal testing, scientists could not have developed a polio vaccine.
Let’s take a look at the facts: The history of the polio vaccine not only demonstrates that monkey experiments are not helping us, but the evidence shows that such experiments are delaying the development of vital therapies.
Poliomyelitis is the generic term for a disease caused by poliovirus that can lead to temporary or permanent paralysis or even death. The worst outbreak of polio in the United States occurred in 1952, when 57,000 people were infected, 21,000 were paralyzed and 3145 died. He quickly became the main subject of research. A 1955 national poll “showed that polio is second only to the atomic bomb because Americans fear it the most.” The public was frightened, and pressure grew on scientists to develop a polio vaccine.
Research carried out before 1910 in patients naturally infected with poliovirus, it was demonstrated that the virus enters the human body through the digestive system. However, after the successful isolation of the virus, vivisector Simon Flexner and his team ignored these important discoveries and focused mainly on the results of studies in monkeys in which experimenters injected the deadly virus directly into the brain or spine of rhesus monkeys.
Since they did not find replication of the virus in the blood of the monkeys, they concluded that the poliovirus infected the brain immediately after entering the body through the nose. This misinterpretation had unintended consequences, as the research community widely supported Flexner’s theory, restricting candidate vaccines to only those grown in nerve cell lines and delaying an effective polio vaccine for many decades.
Wade Hampton Frost, America’s leading epidemiologist, once said that Flexner spent too much time in the laboratory to see the full picture of the epidemic spread of polio.
What’s more, the experimenters developed a prophylactic polio nasal spray that stopped infection in monkeys, but did not protect children from contracting the disease. Instead, some children have lost their sense of smell forever. Years later, we learned that rhesus monkeys are one of the few species with poliovirus No reproduced in the digestive system and No enter the body through the mouth, as in humans.
Experiments on monkeys led to new errors with disastrous consequences.
Thirty years after human studies, vivisectors have discovered that they can protect healthy rhesus monkeys from polio by injecting antibodies obtained from infected monkeys into their spines. This method involved killing the animals, removing tissue from the virus-infected spinal cord and treating it with formaldehyde – or, in the case of a live vaccine, attenuating the virus with sodium ricinoleate.
Unfortunately, when the experimenters vaccinated 20,000 children with these vaccines, 12 of them experienced severe paralysis and six of them died. Both vaccines have been discontinued.
In 1941—more than three decades after researchers discovered how the virus entered the human body– Dr. Albert Sabin published the results of a human autopsy showing that poliovirus is not detectable in the human nasal mucosa. Amazingly, he also found the virus in the human digestive tract, as observed in 1907.
Sabin later said: “Work on [polio] prevention has been delayed for a long time due to … misleading experimental models of the disease in monkeys. “
The tragic consequences did not end there. It has long been known that polio vaccines can be made from human cell cultures, but Sabin and Jonas Salk’s vaccines were made using rhesus monkey kidney cell cultures.
Hundreds of thousands of rhesus monkeys have been imported from India. Many were ill, and soon after arrival, 15% to 20% died. Rhesus monkeys were naturally infected with viruses and their tissues were used to incubate and grow vaccine materials. Viruses present in monkey cells often had very long gestation periods and were ultimately associated with disease in humans decades later. Between 1954 and 1963, 30 million people in the United States were vaccinated with polio shot infected with the simian SV40 virus, an oncogenic DNA virus known to increase people’s chances of developing cancer.
To this day, some scientists continue to rely on monkey tissue for cell cultures, despite the known possibility of infection or misleading information. Many viruses in monkeys are unknown or undetectable and can be transmitted to humans through vaccines. To prevent possible infection, countries such as Canada and the United Kingdom require the use of human cell culture in the production of polio vaccines.
While primate experiments have been conducted in the course of some of the discoveries, this does not mean that animals were vital to the discoveries, or that they predict consequences for human health – or that the same discoveries would not have been made without the use of animals.
“Recognizing the role of animals in such discoveries makes no more sense than encouraging the wearing of lab coats by the scientists involved. Since they always wear them, it’s no surprise that lab coats are present when making breakthroughs. ”
—Robert Matthews, Visiting Reader in Science at Aston University in the UK.
Human health is likely to improve by allocating resources to use non-animal testing methods that are more relevant to humans, rather than chasing the leaders in often misleading animal testing.
Unsurprisingly, most peo
pl
e believe the lie that animal experimentation helps humans – the media, experimenters, universities and lobbying groups shamelessly exaggerate their potential for drug discovery and the true role they have played in past medical advances.
Please take steps to persuade the President of the University of Washington to stop cruel experiments on monkeys and invest in human research:
Act
Script by Katie Bertrand
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