How misleading and dangerous is animal experimentation to human health dilemmas?
Researchers are frequently telling us that research involving animals is vital to continued human medicine. They say that animal research has saved lives, extended life expectancy and improved the quality of (human) life by enabling scientists to conduct critical experiments that identify ways to prevent, treat and cure diseases. How would you answer that? A. Smoking was sold to the public, by physicians, based on the fact that it did not cause cancer in animals. A high cholesterol level was considered safe for the same reason. The blood crisis in France that resulted in thousands dying from AIDS was caused by the mistaken belief that because HIV-infected blood did not kill nonhuman primates it would not kill humans. The reason we have a longer life span and suffer from different diseases than we did a hundred years ago is because of improvements in sanitation and living conditions and because of medical research involving humans or human tissue, epidemiology, advances in technology an
