Do animal experiments help us to find cures for human diseases?
Absolutely not – animal experiments are not the ‘necessary evil’ we have always been led to believe. In fact, using animals as ‘models’ of human disease has misled science and delayed medical progress for many decades (see our report ‘Bred to Suffer’ at www.animalaid.org.uk). Symptoms of various diseases are artificially induced in animals and then researchers try to cure them. The trouble is, the animal’s disease is never exactly the same as the real human version and, more importantly, the cause is not the same – so a cure for the animal is not likely to work in humans. According to one expert: ‘The history of cancer research has been a history of curing cancer in the mouse… We have cured mice of cancer for decades and it simply didn’t work in humans.’ – Dr Richard Klausner, National Cancer Institute Everything we know about HIV and AIDS has been learned from studying people with the disease. But that has not prevented millions of pounds and animals’ lives from being wasted in a fr
