Animal Aid

An Animal Aid report exposing dishonest and unethical drug company practices.

More than 600,000 animals are used in drug development and testing every year in the UK, with millions more used for this purpose worldwide. Despite drug company claims that animal tests are a ‘necessary evil’ to ensure the safety of new medicines, more than one million Britons were hospitalised due to severe adverse drug reactions in 2006 and hundreds of drugs are either withdrawn or relabelled every year due to safety concerns. Scientific studies examining the reliability of animal tests in predicting human outcomes have repeatedly shown that they are no more accurate than tossing a coin.

So why do drug companies, with a collective income of more than £300 billion in 2007, persist with such outdated and unreliable testing methods? In this major new report, we show that animal tests, along with many other pharmaceutical industry practices, are not done in the interest of patient health and safety but are instead designed to protect drug company profits. Using vivid – and often shocking – examples, this fully-referenced report illustrates the host of corrupt practices – including misleading animal tests – that drug companies employ to drive up drug sales, often at the expense of people’s health and to the detriment of publicly-funded healthcare systems such as the NHS.