Is Animal Research Necessary Essay

The fact that there are beings totally capable of feeling pain and appreciating that their lives are going to end is absolutely beyond dispute for any reasonable person. They are innocent, they are suffering. I am speaking, of course, of the 20,000 human beings who die from cancer each day. The only way to make new medicines and effective treatments for them, unfortunately, is to test them on animals. Animal research and testing is necessary to develop new medicines, treatments, and therapies for millions of diseases and illnesses. Even though some people argument that it is not necessary, without animal testing thousands of millions of people would now be dead. Thanks to animal research we know about the effects of certain medicines in the human body, thanks to animal testing we have discovered the cure for diseases that killed people and made them and their families suffer. Animals also benefit from the testing since most human diseases also affect animals; some of the medicines

Leukemia is the most common children cancer (Cancer.org). Treatment for Leukemia relies on early research in mice. 25 years ago, children with Leukemia had a 70% probability of dying on the next 5 years, but thanks to animal research, children have an 80% chance of surviving (Understanding Animal Research-Leukemia).

The most important step in finding treatment is understanding how Leukemia develops. One of the treatments for Leukemia is chemotherapy, and animals had a really important role in the creation of this. Animal testing also helped creating imatinib (Gilvec) which is a drug that treats leukemia and gastrointestinal tumors (Understanding Animal Research-Leukemia). Imatinib has increased life expectancy in an incredible way. The survival rate for childhood Leukemia in 1962 was 4%, but thanks to therapies and treatment, today 80% of the children survive