Why don't animal experiments work?
It is often claimed that animal experiments save lives. In fact the opposite is often true – time and time again people, have been harmed because the results of animal experiments have proved unreliable and misleading when applied to human beings. This is because animals’ bodies are different from ours. They don't get the same diseases that we do and they also often have very different reactions to drugs and chemicals. The success rate for predicting harmful side effects from animal experiments is only 5-25%, which means we would be better off tossing a coin than relying on animal experiments.
A good example of how different species react to a chemical or medicine is penicillin, which is one of the most commonly used antibiotics today. Penicillin is toxic to guinea pigs, yet it cures humans. Products such as aspirin and paracetamol, commonly used to treat people, are highly poisonous to cats. Aspirin causes birth defects in most laboratory animals, but not in humans, and chocolate is poisonous to dogs!
Many drugs, which were passed as safe in animal tests, have caused serious side effects, and even deaths, in people. Studies have shown that 95% of drugs passed as safe by animal tests are later discarded as useless or dangerous. It is hardly surprising that in a recent opinion poll 82% of doctors questioned said they were concerned that animal tests could be misleading.
In addition, none of the animal disease ‘models’ accurately mimic a sick human being, so relying on information obtained from them during experiments can be dangerously misleading. Some people claim that genetic engineering is a way of making animals more like people, but this is not the answer. Although the symptoms they display may appear to be similar to the human disease, these animal ‘models’ still react very differently.
