Animal Testing vs. AIDS Research

This is just how I feel...

Animal rights are very important. I honestly hate the idea of animals in pain or suffering. At the same time, even though I LOVE my cats...I'd kill and eat them if push came to shove. I'd feel bad of course, but I know that they'd eat me if something happened, and I wouldn't blame them.

What people need to know is that almost all HIV/AIDS Research is done on animals. Well hello! Of course it is, we can't go around injecting people with HIV now can we? In a nutshell, if it means saving countless human lives, then yes, test on animals.

When doing research on this topic, one of the main arguments you hear against animal testing (besides the moral concerns) is that: Animals are biologically different from humans and therefore you can't get accurate results from them because something that works on an animal may kill a human and there have been examples of this.

This is not completly true. After all animal testing there are human trials if the treatment/chemical/medicine has been deemed safe for animals. Sometimes they do have different results in humans which can result in death. But if we didn't test it on animals, they'd be even higher death rates in human trials. Can you get accurate results from animal testing? Yes! Although there are biological differences between humans and various animals, there are similarities as well. "Science rarely tries to mimic a whole human disease in an animal. Instead it focuses on one part of the disease that can be seen in the animal." (Philip Connolly, CMP)

Here is a short list of breakthroughs that were brought about through animal research:

• Antibiotics for the treatment of bacterial infections;
• Vaccines for smallpox, tetanus, diptheria, polio, measles, lyme disease, hepatitis B and chicken pox, gene therapy, Insulin to control diabetes;
• Anti-coagulants, anesthesia, and neuromuscular blocking agents;
• Chemotherapy for cancer patients;
• Pacemaker implants to treat cardiac patients;
• Discovery of the HIV virus and development of drugs to control the progression of AIDS;
• Organ transplantation techniques.

For each of these discoveries, how many animals died. A couple hundred? Is that worth saving millions of human lives? Hell Yeah! At the same time researches do try to minimize the pain that animals feel. "Nearly all research, approximately 94 percent, either does not involve pain or uses analgesics or anesthesia. However, some research, about six percent, involves some pain to animal, primarily in the area of pain research itself. Pain is a significant medical problem and work continues into drugs and treatments to help alleviate the effects of arthritis, headaches, cancer and angina, for example." (http://www.amprogress.org/)

"Adjunct testing methods are used in nearly all phases of biomedical research. However, they can not give us definitive assessment as to how substances will interact in complex organisms. Compounds must be tested on living systems – made up of interrelated organs and organ systems – before they can be tried in human beings." (http://www.amprogress.org)

I do think we should use alternative methods when possible, but this isn't possible at this time. Of course, if you still have objections to animal testing, you can always refuse medication and treatment next time you are sick, because you can be sure it's the result of animal testing.