ANIMAL RESEARCH T A K E S LIVES
- Humans and Animals BOTH Suffer
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To investigate ARSL's claim (page 6 of the booklet) that "rehabilitation for thousands of head injury and stroke victims are a result of techniques developed in animals" the writer referred to the authoritative and influential journal of the American Heart Association titled Stroke. In issue 7:14 of 1976 an article headed "Clinical Relevance of Experimental Stroke Models" by G.F. Molinari says the following:
"The way researchers 'simulate' a stroke in an animal is by the application of microsurgical spring-clips to an artery. The clipping itself affects blood vessels in ways totally artificial and never seen in blood vessels of human stroke patients."
In the May 1989 issue of Stroke, Samuel Neff of the New England Medical Centre wrote:
"The repeated failure of laboratory-proven stroke therapies in human beings can be due only to the inapplicability of animal models to human cerebrovascular disease."
Less than a year later, in January 1990, in Stroke, David O. Wiebers and his colleagues at the Mayo Clinic and the University of Iowa wrote a substantial and comprehensive article in which they called the relevance of information from animal experiments "dubious". They cited a review of experimental treatments for stroke over the past decade extracts of which read:
In a further issue of Stroke, July 1990, Weibers wrote:
"Dozens of treatments tested on animals did not work in people."
He, along with his team of researchers, cautioned against the assumption that information from animal experiments is relevant to the human disease. In the same issue, Justin Zivin and James Grotta agreed that:
"Drug studies in animal models have not... translated into effective therapy in humans."
Stroke journal, which is the most relevant and weighty source of information applicable to the subject states in the above article:
"Conclusions arising from the whole Stroke debate were that reliance on animal models impede rather than advance scientific progress in the treatment of stroke."
"The single most effective means of dealing with strokes is still prevention. Hypertension, smoking and cholesterol levels can be controlled. When they are not, serious damage to the brain is very difficult to stop."
(Update of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, Washington D.C., kindly supplied by K. & M. Ungar, U.S.A.)
Other researchers agree with the findings revealed in Stroke journal, the following being a typical example of what the honest investigator can turn up given time and patience:
"Basic physiology tells us there is no suitable animal model for strokes because, unlike humans, animals have a collateral vascular system in their brains which allows blood to bypass clots; therefore they do not have strokes in the way humans do, nor are the effects from stroke the same. In addition, many domestic animals have a retermirable system of blood vessels which effectively filters out blood clots and other substances that might otherwise flow to the brain."
(J. Moossy, "Morphological Validation of Ischemic Stroke Models", Cerebrovascular Diseases, edited by T.R. Price and E. Nelson, New York, Raven Press, 1979, page 7.)
In One Thousand Doctors (and many more) Against Vivisection, Hans Ruesch publishes the following statement made by Dr Werner Hartinger, acclaimed German surgeon and advocate for the abolition of vivisection:
"There are only two categories of doctors and scientists who are not opposed to vivisection: Those who don't know enough about it, and those who make money from it."
A glimpse at page 21 of the booklet Animal Research Saves Lives reveals that without exception its publishers:
Head Injury is covered in Chapter 20.