Sunday, June 24, 2007
Good News: New vaccine could prevent ravages of Alzheimer's disease
According to this article, a promising new vaccine is perhaps just around the corner that prevents the worst symptoms of Alzheimer's disease. They hope to have it available to patients in about six years. This vaccine, like most treatments, was first tested on animals, in this case mice, before it went to human clinical trials. Yet, despite seemingly infinite examples to the contrary, we are told ad nauseum by ARAs that animal testing is completely unnecessary. We are told by ARAs that animal testing has contributed very little to the advancement of medicine. We are told it is nothing more than torture of animals by evil, sadistic scientists greedy for money. History ( in conjunction with common sense ) , of course tells us otherwise and exposes their lies for what they are. For a list of historical medical milestones made possible by animal testing you can go here. For a listing of veterinary applications made possible by animal testing, go here. The Research Defense Society also offers a cool feature for updates on current, ongoing research, that can be accessed here.
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3 comments:
All you need to read is the following book written by a physician and a veterinarian to learn that animal testing is not only useless, but downright harmful to humans: “Sacred Cows and Golden Geese: The Human Cost of Experiments on Animals”, C. Ray Greek, MD and Jean Swingle Greek, DVM. This is NOT an animal rights book, it's written from the POV of the efficacy of animal research for humans, and it's an eye opener.
The reason we ARA's repeat that mantra about animal research being unnecessary and useless "ad nauseum" is because it's true.
You can also read: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/238140/vivisection_is_for_losers_why_animal.html and http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/248588/alternatives_to_animal_research_vivisection.html for more information. Hope that helps.
Thanks for your comments. I have not read the book in question, but I do know that many of the Greeks' assertions have been challenged and debunked by some of their scientific peers, and that their book did receive some less-than-favorable reviews by those peers. Furthermore, a search of PubMed for "Ray Greek" yields only one hit, and it is a letter to the editor, not a research paper. It does not seem that Dr. Greek is particularly well published in terms of research in medical journals.
IMHO, to claim that animal research is useless or unnecessary flies in the face of reason and historical facts. The historical importance of animal research to medicine is well documented. You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts, and the facts about the importance of animal research are quite solid and abundantly clear, in my view. Believing that animal research is useless or unnecessary is akin to believing the worlds is flat, IMHO. I think it also flies in the face of logic and common sense as well. Consider this. Animal research is a very expensive proposition. The animals themselves are specially bred and are very expensive. A single rat can cost about $20, a guinea pig or rabbit up to $100, and a monkey can cost more than a thousand. The animals have to be housed and fed, the cages cleaned, etc.. All of this is time consuming and labor intensive, and thus very expensive. Common sense would dictate that if animal research were truly unnecessary as ARAs claim, it would already be gone for purely economic reasons. After all, what business who has share holders to answer to, or what scientist in academia who has a limited grant budget wants to spend money they don't have to?
Ray Greek is an animal rights activist and about as much of an MD as Jerry Vlasak, though I believe he at least does not promote physical violence. He has founded more animal rights organizations than he has published scientific papers (and tends to name them deceptively, like "Europeans for Medical Progress.") You want good scientific info, you end up getting pro-research info, because that's what data support. Check out the National Academies book on the subject available as a free pdf.
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