Animal Testing - Is it Justified?

In the past few decades, we have been told by the nutritionists to eat more carbohydrates and less fat. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has designed the "food pyramid" that recommends a diet that is low in pork, fish and poultry, and high in pasta, bread and cereals.

Following the government's advice, fat consumption has gone down by 17.5%, but at the same time the calories available in the food we consume have gone up, from 3,100 calories per capita per day in the 1960s to 3,700 in the 1990s, according to the USDA. Currently more than one in two American adults could be classified as overweight and more than one in four-as obese. Introduction of new fat-free products and food additives has, paradoxically, made the obesity problem worse. What's even more disturbing is that literally thousands of people get seriously ill every year from eating diet food.

Approximately 3,000 different chemicals as food preservatives, stabilizers, flavor enhancers, and artificial dyes are added to our food, and with only one paramount purpose -to extend its shelf life. Some of them are neutral or even beneficial to our health, like natural vitamins and minerals added to juices, but many are simply toxic. They contribute to and cause cancer, allergies, depression, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, birth defects, chronic fatigue, obesity and countless other diseases and illnesses labeled by today medicine as incurable or difficult to treat. Interestingly enough, the same companies that produce toxic chemicals that poison us also produce prescription drugs and an astounding variety of over-the-counter painkillers to ease the pain or alleviate the symptoms of illnesses the very same chemicals trigger.

The American Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requires careful evaluation of all chemical substances intended for human intake-should it be a new diet pill or an artificial color in a lollipop-before their release to the public. These studies are intended to determine their potency and any adverse reactions. In reality, however, the chemicals found in our foodstuff and drugs undergo little or no testing for chronic, low level exposures and for chronic health effects. Majority of tests used by companies to verify safety of a specific chemical are conducted on animals. The idea that a test or operation done on an animal will show results that are directly translatable to humans is simply ridiculous. Due to irreconcilable anatomical, physiological and psychological differences between animals and human beings, the results of animal tests cannot be applied to humans with any degree of confidence. This can be evidently illustrated in many ways; here are just a few:

'It is accepted that animal tests are successful in identifying cancer-causing agents in only 37% of cases. This means, in effect, that the results of the tests are more times wrong than right and are significantly statistically worse than tossing a coin.

Usually, the animals on which new drugs are tested are relatively healthy before the testing. It means that ailment or trauma has to be rapidly and artificially induced, which is in no way related to the spontaneous and naturally occurring ways in which humans develop illness. Take under consideration the case of osteoarthritis, a human degenerative disease, resulting in painful and grotesque deformities of the joints due to the illness of the collagen. To mimic the lameness in cats, dogs, sheep and pigs researchers beat animals' joints with hammer blows, inject them with irritating liquids, and irradiate them with ionizing radiation. It is clear that the resulting fractures, inflammation and contusions bear no relation to human osteoarthritis. Drugs tested on such artificially diseased animal test subjects cannot possibly yield results relevant to a spontaneous human disease.

Two grams of scopolamine kill a human being, but cats and dogs stand hundred times higher dosages. A single Aminata phalloides mushroom can wipe out a whole human family, but it's healthy for the rabbit, one of the favorite laboratory animals. Chloramphenicol damages the blood-producing bone marrow in humans, but in no other animal. A porcupine can eat one lump without discomfort as much opium as a human addict smokes in two weeks, and wash it down with as much prussic acid to poison a regiment of soldiers. Arsenic kills humans but is harmless to chickens, sheep, monkeys and guinea pigs. Morphine, which calms and anaesthetizes man, causes maniacal excitement in cats and mice. On the other hand our sweet almond can kill foxes, our common parsley is poisonous to parrots, and our revered penicillin strikes another favorite laboratory animal dead - the guinea pig.Digitalis that is used to lower blood pressure in humans dangerously raises the blood pressure of dogs. Many common laboratory animals such as cats, dogs, hamsters, rats and mice, do not require dietary intake of vitamin C, because their bodies can produce it on their own. However, if you deprive humans, guinea pigs and some primates of dietary vitamin C they will die of scurvy. These examples clearly show that there is no true correlation between different species, at least in terms of reactions to various chemical substances.