About 26 million animals are used for testing every year in the United States. Some people say that animal testing has contributed too many lifesaving cures, whereas others believe would believe animal testing is cruel.
Animal testing is any scientific experiment or test in which a live animal is forced to undergo something, such as medical treatments, to determine the toxicity of medications, check the safety of products destined for human use, and other biomedical, commercial, and health care uses. Which can be harmful towards the animals and beneficial to humans.
Animal testing has contributed too many life-saving cures and treatments. Medical studies has stored and stepped forward the lives of hundreds of thousands of human beings. The California Biomedical Research Association states that nearly every medical breakthrough resulted directly from research using animals. There’s experiments in which dogs had their pancreases removed, helped discover of insulin. The cause of that helped save lives with diabetes. In 1988 to 2016 there’s been 350,000 cases to 27 cases where the polio vaccine, tested on animals reduced the global occurrence of diseases. Animal research has contributed to understanding and treating conditions such as brain injury, childhood leukemia, and brain cancer, tuberculosis, and many others. Chris Abee, Director of the University Of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center 's animal research facility, says that “we wouldn 't have a vaccine for hepatitis B
And nearly every Laureate in Physiology or Medicine has relied on animal data for the research. The big question is, if we were to take away the animal testing, and take away what we, and scientist rely so heavily on, where does that leave us? Our technologies, our vaccines, our antibiotics, organ transplants, dialysis, blood transfusions, all nothing, never discovered. The essential need for animal research is recognized and supported by health agencies all over the world. Without it, a big portion of the world population today would not have had the privilege to walk this earth.
Despite many decades of animal testing such as cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, we still not have reliable and fully effective cures but we wasted huge amount of money and animal life. Also, misleading safety tests in animals directly hurt humans, there was a famous animal testing accident call "elephant man trial", the experiment originally manipulated the body 's immune system to treat auto-immune diseases such as arthritis. At the beginning, researchers had high hopes for it after monkeys injected with it showed no problems. Finally, several of the men suffered permanent organ damage, and one man’s head swelled up so horribly that British tabloids refer to the case as the ‘elephant man trial’(Felix
There is much controversy over whether or not animals should be used to test new procedures and medications. I personally believe that animal testing is crucial to scientific development. Every life lost is a tragedy but as seen in the story, Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keys, it will help us determine what will happen to a human test subjects without human losses. In this essay I will support my belief that animal research is important to human survival and is worth the risk. Animal research has played a vital part in nearly every medical breakthrough over the last decade.
There is much controversy with regards to animal testing for medical research and there has been throughout the centuries. We can trace the issue back all the way to the 4th century when we have the first record of animal experimentation, Aristotle dissecting animals for study. In the 1600s, scientists began using animals as a way to explore the human body which led to many advancements in the medical field. Such advancements include Emil von Bering finding a cure for diphtheria toxin for guinea pigs; further research allowed him to produce a diphtheria vaccine for humans (Bright).In spite of these many medical achievements brought on through the use of animal testing, there are still those that argue the practice is not justifiable and should
According to the Biomedical Research Association, animal testing has led to almost all revolutionary medical discoveries that have occurred in the past century (“CBRA: Fact Sheet” 2). One of these notable discoveries was that of the polio vaccine; with the polio vaccine, the number of cases diminished from hundreds of thousands to only hundreds, in the course of 25 years (“Poliomyelitis”). Another discovery, that with the help of animal testing has saved multiple lives, is that of insulin. The invention of insulin is a necessity for survival to those diagnosed with diabetes, and it’s all thanks to experiments done on animals (Badyal and Chetna 258). In addition to these, many other medical breakthroughs have occurred because of animal testing; just a few of these include the treatment of tetanus, leprosy, tuberculosis, brucellosis, and Prontosil, one of the first antibacterial treatments (Badyal and Chetna 258).
Yes, animals have been used in the past but, with the use of computers we can save lives, and make many more discoveries in the medical field. Animals don’t deserve to be kept in cages and be constantly observed and poked at. Thousands of animal lives are wasted every year and we can stop that by stopping testing on animals. Dvorsky, George. " Technological Alternatives Can End the Experimental Use of Animals.
Many debilitating diseases and conditions have been cured and prevented using vaccinations that were tested on animals. For example, Emil von Behring performed an experiment on guinea pigs that helped form the vaccine for diphtheria (Soft Schools). The significance of this experiment helped von Behring earn a Nobel Prize in Physiology (Soft Schools). Following von Behring’s findings, Edgar Adrian used frogs to confirm the specific way that the brain sends signals to different parts of the body (Soft Schools). Advancements in the understanding of diabetes, tuberculosis, and polio, along with the formation of anesthetics all were successful with the help of animal testing (Soft Schools).
Then again, medical examinations involving animal testing have greatly improved the health being of humans. Surgical methods and medications nowadays would not be discovered if it was not for the understanding of the diseases and how the body works. This can be approached by using animal testing. Animal experimentation has contributed to the abundance of medication we now have in the palm of our hands. For instance, we have treatments for asthma, high blood pressure, and diabetes which were all discovered using animal testing.
Animal experimentation has been an easy and ethically acceptable way to research and test medicines and treatments for humans since the time of the ancient Greeks. Animals opened the door for the scientists and philosophers of old to learn things about the human body that were previously explained with magic and superstition. Naturally, science has come a long way since the ancient Greeks. Today, we have a whole host of medical resources at our disposal, which begs the question: Do we truly need animals in medical research anymore? Not only that, but the practices with animals at thousands of labs across the United States have been notoriously vague for years.
By the nineteenth century, animal experimentation was more commonly used to receive a better understanding of the “pathology…,disease, progression, …diagnosis and prognosis” (Franco). Millions of lives were saved due to discoveries of “vitamins, hormones, antibiotics, safe blood transfusion, vaccines, insulin, hemodialysis, chemo and radiotherapy for cancer, the eradication of smallpox,… advanced means of diagnostic and new surgical techniques” all of which were all possible because of animal experimentation (Franco). In 1912, an article titled, “Solving Medical Mysteries by Help of Animals” was published in the New York Times (Metz). The author, Metz, was a businessman and politician from New York who used this article to publicly inform society that testing on small animals in research could benefit society in extensive ways. This article described a scene in which animals were segregated into rooms and used as experimental subjects to discover how to stop the spread of epidemics and diseases that were occurring within society (Metz).
This included 1,272 monkeys, 5,771 rabbits, 24,556 guinea pigs, and 33,280 hamsters. This shows that scientists don’t care about what the animals are going through, pain or no pain, they just want to advance in medical techniques, do their job, and get their money. Although humans may benefit from successful animal research, the pain, suffering, and deaths of these animals are not worth this kind of benefit. Animals and humans are alike in many ways. We both think, feel, behave, and experience pain.
However, both sides agree that it would be beneficial to reduce animal suffering by finding alternatives to this practice. On one side of the spectrum, supporters of animal testing point out how valuable the practice is to scientists, and the medical advances that have stemmed from animal research. According to the Foundation for Biomedical Research (FBR), “…practically every drug, treatment, medical device, diagnostic tool or cure we have today was developed with the help of lab animals” (“Benefits of Biomedical Research”). The FBR is clearly stating that, without the help of animal testing, medical advances would be nearly impossible.
Leukemia used to be a death sentence with a survival rate of 4%, but now, because of testing, there is an 80% chance of survival. These odds are much more pleasant than the ones before research. People have gotten help for many diseases because of the research and testing done on animals. Not only does testing help humans, it also leads to developing life saving medical treatments for animals as well.
Dogs have also contributed to the research and development of open heart surgery. Critics say that experimenting on animals is cruel and unethical, what those critics do not know is that " at least 85 HIV/AIDs vaccines have been cured" (Source
Moreover, animals are used to develop medical treatments, check the safety of any products before people can use it and in science education. Therefore, without using animals in the medical and scientific studies the products and all the medicine would be based on theory only. Furthermore, people will use something that may cause serious damages to them. Animal testing has provided many