Fatone: this is why animal testing affect human health (ph: huffingtonpost.com
“ your twelve year old daughter is leaving for a summer camp and for the first time traveling by air alone. But would you let get on that plane knowing that the chances that arrive at their destination without incident to less than 10%? “
If the answer is no, then you have to ask why we accept risk percentages rather similar when it comes to sperimentazioneanimale.
After passing tests on animals, all new drugs are obliged to enter the stage of clinical trials in humans. Well, anyone who participates as a volunteer in one of these clinical trials should know that over 90% of cases and the remedy proved effective and safe in animals will prove to be rather ineffective or even dangerous about him.
In a previous series of articles I have tried to explain why animal testing does not work. A failure in this field there is much more expensive than in any other area of ??science, and causes harm to us humans in three different ways, but equally important.
………
FIRST – The safety testing in animals can harm us in a direct way
In March 2006, six human volunteers were given a dose of TGN 1412, an experimental therapy created by the company TeGenero. As told by the online journal Slate: “In a few minutes, the six volunteers were lying on the ground in the throes of collapse. The compound was designed to attenuate the immune response, while in reality he had magnified, triggering a series of chemical reactions that sent all six volunteers straight to the hospital. For many of them the result of damage to internal organs is irreversible, and the head of one of them hath been inflated so so horrendous that the British tabloids have dubbed the event “The Elephant Man trial. ‘”
The TGN 1412 had been tested on mice, rabbits, rats and monkeys were found without any adverse effects. As if that were not enough, the cynomolgus monkeys used in the experiments were chosen precisely because it was believed that replicating human reactions that were the focus of the new remedy TGN 1412 (1). In short, not only in the test had been used in several animal species, but these species were chosen that were thought to be most suitable for this purpose. Not only did the monkeys were subjected to various tests of repeated dose toxicity but for four consecutive weeks he had been given doses 500 times greater than those subsequently administered to human volunteers. And in spite of this, none of them had accused any of the adverse reactions that hit men a few minutes after receiving a tiny dose of the remedy under trial.The case of TGN 1412 exemplifies the extent to which they are unreliable animal experiments designed to test whether a compound or a new remedy will be safe for humans. Here are some other examples of test animals that have caused serious damage to man:
> In 2004, Elan Pharmaceuticals was forced to interrupt the trial for a vaccine for Alzheimer’s disease that was well cared for models of “Alzheimer’s mice” because the substance had caused brain inflammation in humans (2) .
> A gene therapy highly touted because he cared for dogs with hemophilia was abandoned because he had damaged the liver and caused other problems in humans, problems never emerged in animal experiments.
> A clinical trial on fialuridina, considered a promising remedy for hepatitis B, run by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) was abruptly stopped when it was discovered that had caused very serious liver problems than seven people, five of them died and two of which made necessary a liver transplant. (3)
In short, far from protecting us, animal testing exposes us to serious risks. In addition to the direct risks, such as those described above, there are also indirect effects rilevantii.
……………
SECOND – misleading animal tests may lead us to discard remedies that would have been beneficial to humans.
It is not possible to quantify how many opportunities have been lost because of unreliable animal experiments. But countless examples tell us that fortunately the researchers themselves are judging unreliable animal tests. For example:
> An editorial in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery (http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v2/n3/full/nrd1057.html) reveals that tamoxifen, one of the most effective remedies against certain forms of breast cancer was about to be discarded because it caused liver tumors in rats, which does not happen in humans.
> The treatment for leukemia based on Gleevec was almost lost because it causes a severe form of toxicity in dogs but not in humans (4). Fortunately, the manufacturer decided to develop it on the basis of the promising results obtained on human cell cultures.
argues John Pippin , director of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM):
“The Gleevec is a success story built on the basis of a rational design and test methodologies made with species-specific, a remedy that prolongs the life that would never have been developed if the results of animal tests were taken seriously by researchers.
> The experiments carried out on animals delayed the approval of cyclosporine, remedy successfully used for autoimmune disorders and to combat rejection after organ transplantation (5).
> Experiments carried out on animals suggested that an early loss of vision is the cause of irreversible blindness, as long as a person blind from birth is not regained his sight after an operation to remove a cataract surgery performed when he was already in there with years (6). As a result of this discovery, “human”, many individuals can now blind regain their sight thanks to operations on the basis of previous animal experiments were deemed unnecessary.
Only five of the 10,000 potential remedies tested in the laboratory reach the stage of clinical trials in humans. Many do not go beyond the test animals due to species-specific reactions. But it is possible, even probable that many of these substances would prove extraordinarily safe and effective for humans.
Question: How many humans would be alive today if we had used instead of animals in research methods and experimentation really reliable? Methods actually able to predict the possible adverse effects and the effectiveness of the remedies? It ‘impossible not to ask.
And now we come to the third cause us harm that animal experiments.
………..
THIRD – The time and money wasted in animal experiments could be channeled to support testing of a completely different species-specific reliability.
unreliable animal model of the disease can push the manufacturers of care and treatment in the wrong direction, with waste of time and considerable investment. On average, a pharmaceutical company spends more than $ 1 billion to bring a new remedy on the market. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) American conveys almost half of its funding – up to 14.5 billion per year in tax payers – to animal experiments.
The researchers are repeatedly misled and pushed into blind alleys from information extrapolated from animal experiments that prove later, inaccurate, or even insignificant in contrast to the human biology. It took more than 25 years of failure in the field of vaccines against AIDS because researchers finally began to question the usefulness of non-human primates for experiments on HIV, and more than 30 years because they realized that the model rodent diabetes is wrong.
We can be sure that the victims of the tragedy of the TGN 1412 will not risk ever more life on the basis of animal experiments. The truth is that an in vitro assay based on human cultures would have foreseen the harmful effects of drug and protected men (7).
many other human beings still have to suffer and die before we realize that if we really want to help ourselves, we must eliminate the root animal experimentation and to concentrate on the development of more effective methods based on man? “.
Bibliography
1 – Akhtar (2012) Animals and public health. Why treating animals better is critical to human welfare. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 147-148.
2 – Allen. Of mice and men. The problems with animal testing. Slate. June 1, 2006.
3 – McKenzie, et al. Hepatic Failure and Lactic Acidosis Due to Fialuridine (FIAU), an Investigational Nucleoside Analogue for Chronic Hepatitis B. N Engl J Med 1995, 333:1099-1105.
4 – Pippin. South Texas Law Review 2013; 54: 469-511.
5 – Greek, Greek. Animal research and human disease. JAMA 2000, 283: 743-744.
6 – Ostrovsky, et al. Following extended congenital blindness.Psychological Vision Science 2006 17: 1009-1014
7 – Dhir et al. A predictive biomimetic model of cytokine release induced by TGN1412 and other therapeutic monoclonal antibodies. J. Immunotoxicol. 2012; 9:34-42.
Read the original here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aysha-akhtar/animal-experiments_b_4209541.html
( text sent to the State by Joseph Fatone, dog trainer of Manfredonia )
No comments:
Post a Comment