Now that there are numerous, and far more effective means for testing new drugs for efficacy and safety, the FDA clings to animal testing more out of a mindset of “this is the way we’ve always done it” – or more accurately, “this is the way it’s been done since Aristotle’s time”… We're far more advanced in this century.
To give you a feel for the absurdity of continued use of animal testing:
- According to the former scientific executive of Huntingdon Life Sciences, animal tests and human results agree only '5%-25% of the time'
- When asked if they agreed that animal experiments can be misleading 'because of anatomical and physiological differences between animals and humans', 88% of doctors agreed.
Here’s a primer for more reasons to not test on animals from Johns Hopkins.
The most obvious reason to discontinue animal testing, cruelty (they're kept in small cages they're entire lives, made terribly ill to then see if the drug can "cure" them, then killed - or die - if it doesn't), is compounded by the end result: animal testing does not translate well to humans: No matter how “similar” we may be to other species, far too many differences exist. Using my situation as an example, most if not all biologics for RA have been found to be effective in only 30-50% of patients - none have helped me – reliance instead on the latest technology, developed for the human body, simply makes sense.
Please immediately begin the process of discontinuing this outmoded, and quite cruel, practice.
Only we can stop the cruel and outdated practice of testing on animals for drug research. There's other methods, now, plus tests conducted on other species don't translate well to the human body, anyway.
For more information before signing, here's two short but very informative pages:
testing without torture
problems with animal testing
Please help by signing. Thank you.
